The clouds have fallen from the sky

Theres a beautiful essay by F Scott Fitzgerald called My Lost City. In it, he explains how the view from the top of the newly minted Empire State building forever changed the city of his imagination.

"From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building and, just as it had been a tradition of mine to climb to the Plaza Roof to take leave of the beautiful city, extending as far as eyes could reach, so now I went to the roof of the last and most magnificent of towers. Then I understood -- everything was explained: I had discovered the crowning error of the city, its Pandoras box. Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed but that it had limits -- from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground."

Today, I walked home over the Queensboro Bridge bridge and saw all of lower Manhattan where the World Trade center used to be in smoke -- as if the clouds had fallen from the sky -- and something shifted in my imagination too. I suppose thats partially what the criminals hoped to accomplish; such crimes operate as much in the mind as in the streets, and are commited against dreams as well as cities and innocents. And we can resist. Ill give blood, check in on my neighbours, call my friends and family, and know that our imaginations in concert will be irrepressible and right.

This last Fourth of July some friends and I walked down by Hell Gate bridge on the east river to watch the fireworks. We arrived at around eight oclock and stood down under the bridge with thousands of others waiting for the show. When the fireworks finally started they were totally obscured by the buildings down river, and we could see nothing but the traces of light along the clouds.

The scale of this city can be difficult for a newcomer to grasp, so its not surprising that the thousands of us at the edge of the river that night mistakenly assumed we would be able to see the explosions along the skyline. All we saw that night were reflections; but there was something comforting in the knowledge that all of us there were at the river for our first fourth of July in New York, and that next year -- long after we have figured out where to go for a better view -- there will be thousands more to dream in our place.

Av Alexander Lencicki 13 sep 2001 14:20