3/6/20-3/14/20 — At the time that I was in New York City, when walking from the 34th St station of the ACE line, which I boarded in the village where the discussion revolved around books, likelier than not, the tvs in the bars and small-format hotels of Hell’s Kitchen played the 2016 Republican debates. The same forces that drove me up the stairs of a condemnable apartment to put a few more hours into a manuscript no longer possess me. In the noblest interpretation of the life I was leading then, it could be said that those discussion in the village about books, films, and the shared interests of a writerly ilk, inspired me to contribute a testament to existence in my own right. Compulsion better explains my insane obsession than nobility can. At the time, it felt only natural, and perhaps my energy did need to flare until an openness to every idea was cauterized. The only activities seeming now to bring the bottomless detriment of those impressions into coherent remembrance are the same two activities that led me there in the first place, writing and music, namely, although writing deserves a far greater share of the blame. Why it remains my vocation despite the fact that writing is also a less reliable remedy than music is a very mystery.
Sadly one finds the view of Manhattan from a pier in Brooklyn does not translate directly into the verbal acuity able to rival the impression the sight makes on a young man. Our lack of collective success may have been inevitable. The fact of our lack of collective success degrades the memory. Vanity made the idea of bringing grand intentions to bare all but impossible. Youth is vain, and even those individuals I knew that were not ambitious, however proud they were of their intelligence or insights, found means to make their restraint their vanity. Along the streets of that sight of Manhattan, the ecosystem of New York did enliven, but only in the manner nervousness would, and consideration by way of a stronger faculty escaped me then. All the same, the tenor of those days was a prescription for a life of value. The thoughts of my contemporaries deserved better. It is by reading the deferrals and trivia of those once devoted to letters that I find those younger days need be admonished. Life, or the way one lives, should gain from the subtlety found in literature, but I wonder if those days neglected to recognize the unavoidable ironies of writing. In sustaining these ideas of what we were to be, it became impossible to understand what we were.
The difference between consideration and what a person actually is in space contains myriads. The reason my remembrances of New York are redemptive is due to the fact that it is impossible to live either by intention or actual fact alone. For a certain kind of writer, it is blithe unawareness, manifested in the florid depiction of a city at a place in time in fiction, that accounts for both breathtaking depiction and the absence of consequentiality. A kind of reconstruction able to be navigated from a remove sheds light on sectors of experience left darkened in our cognizance of that experience. It is an endeavor to make experience whole. The death of a kind of youth, the one most cherished, and perhaps least valuable, as was endured in the Hell’s Kitchen apartment, has made me a different variety of writer. The move to the apartment on Rivington and the brief feeling of coherence found there are mine to parse. Those places cannot be revisited for the time being. It therefore becomes all the more imperative to consider what it had meant. To think that I could not lay that same claim I did once were I 23 now makes my follies seem valuable.
