Lorem Ipsum

Yesterday, Susan quoted Joan Didion:

"I am not sure that it is possible for anyone brought up in the East to appreciate entirely what New York, the idea of New York, means to those of us who came out of the West and the South... New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself."

But I don't agree, which makes me suspect it may be a generational thing. Either that or a cultural thing—I was raised by hippies, after all, and mostly in suburbia. But mostly, Didion's description of New York reminds me of what native New Yorkers and other East Coasterners tend to say about it.

For me, raised in suburban Northern California in the '70s, the idea of New York was kind of a vague one, and wasn't that big a deal. Okay, so it's the archetypal Big City; but it seemed neither romantic nor mysterious to me. Squalid, colorful, dangerous; actually, I think my perceptions of it were largely shaped by comic books.

The city's acquired a slightly more mystical patina for me over the years, but that's because I've read some of what the people who love it have written about it. I've read Age of Innocence, and Helene (84 Charing Cross Road) Hanff's paean to it (the name of which I'm blanking on), and Helprin's Winter's Tale, and I've known people who grew up there, and I've visited a couple times.

But despite Wall Street and the WTC, I don't tend to think of NYC as the financial center of the world—I guess I don't have a city that I think of that way. And despite the UN and so on, I don't tend to think of it as a major center of power—Washington, D.C. fills that role for me. And despite Broadway, I don't think of NYC as particularly romantic or mysterious or a city of dreams; San Francisco's always seemed more romantic and mysterious to me (fog, cable cars), and Hollywood is where you go to fulfill dramatic aspirations. The closest New York comes to that for me is the fact that it's the center of the publishing world.

(In the Bay Area, "The City" invariably means San Francisco. (And "the Bay Area" invariably means "the San Francisco Bay Area.") I gather that in large areas of the East Coast, it means NYC.)

So it's interesting and surprising to me to hear Didion assign NYC the same mystical significance, almost bordering on reverence, that I hear from East-Coast friends. I wonder if my father's generation of West-Coasterners had that same feeling about New York.