Joan Didion and NY

I've always loved Joan Didion's writing. It started when I got her book The Year of Magical Thinking, years ago. I loved her style of writing - crisp, honest, sarcastic at times - so much that I sought out her other books, and eventually got her book of collected nonfiction, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live. I was pretty happy to see this book on one of my class reading lists this semester. Didion has written lines like, "...All I knew then was what I couldn't do. All I knew then was what I wasn't, and it took me some years to discover what I was. Which was a writer. By which I mean not a 'good' writer or 'bad' writer, but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on a piece of paper...." One of her more well-known essays is one called "Goodbye to All That." It is an essay about falling in and then out of love with New York. Although she must have fallen back in love with it at some point, because she lives here now. I wish I could reprint the whole thing for you. I have been reading and rereading it. This adjustment period to NY is hard. It is hard to love a place that seems very desperate, very lonely. Human connection is not so readily available on the streets here as it is in other places. When I was coming back from the store, a woman was walking her dog. I looked up at her and smiled, because that's what you did in NC, waiting for her to say hi, and it turned out she wasn't even looking at me, she was staring at the concrete. At the store, the cashiers can't get you out fast enough. Not a response to my "Hello," not a smile as you leave, nothing. How did this happen to us? When did this become the norm here?

Here is some of Didion's essay:

"It is easy to see the beginning of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was....All I mean is that I was very young in New York, and that at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young anymore...."

It's funny, 3 years ago when I lived here, I didn't sense this unease with the city. Was it because I knew I was going back to Chapel Hill in 8 weeks? Was it because I was younger, and had only lived in Carolina for a year? I don't know. Maybe a combination of all of those things. I don't know how long it will take me to become acclimated here once again. Even something as simple as browsing the Craigslist ads for nannies; how different the two experiences were. Here, you can practically hear the entitlement coming off the screen in the posts. Maybe I'm cranky because of lack of sleep. Every night and every morning, I am kept awake or woken up by outside noise. At night, it's blaring music and people shouting; in the morning it is the trash truck, car alarms or some other large truck coming down the street. And because I have no a/c, my window is open. Good times. I can't wait for cold weather.

At any rate, I'm here, and need to learn some way to live in this city.