By MEGAN CATTEL
STAFF WRITER
(Graphic by Michael Rezin/The Ram)
Last week, a New York Times article entitled “The Long Goodbye” by Alex Williams caught my eye. The expose on the growing disillusionment among writers struggling to make a living in New York City began with lines from one of my favorite Joan Didion essays, “Goodbye to All That.” Since its publication in 1967, the essay has been canonized as the original “Farewell New York” ode and is cited as an inspiration for the growing trend of personal accounts of abandoning the Big Apple.
“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,” Didion writes, capturing the romanticized vision of New York that only those who hail from afar cultivate.
“To an Eastern child, particularly a child who always has an uncle on Wall Street and who has spent several hundred Saturdays first at F.A.O. Schwarz, New York is just a city…a plausible place for people to live,” Didion explains “But to those who have come from places where no one has heard of Lester Lanin…Wall Street, Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not places at all but abstractions.”
Didion, a native Californian, illustrates the journey of a stranger in a new land and the battle to come to grips with disillusionment. “New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion,” she concludes, “the shining and perishable dream itself.”
After eight years of living in Manhattan, Didion packed her bags and left for Los Angeles, where she has lived ever since.
Didion’s writing speaks to the pioneers who had deeply romanticized the legend of New York from their small towns and faraway suburbs, seeking a life of grandeur. For this reason, I find myself relating to her prose, her unflinching descriptions of loneliness and her portrayal of the city as stereotypically unfriendly. As a Floridian, I am no stranger to the overwhelming melancholy and isolation she feels in New York.
As one of those wandering outsiders, I used to have dreams of New York before arriving here. I grew up in a town called Palm Harbor, situated between St. Petersburg and Tampa (For reference: where Magic Mike and Spring Breakers were filmed.) I was in pursuit of a place with more excitement; I got more than I bargained for when I drove up Fordham Road on move-in day in the midst of Hurricane Irene, passing by the sign for Butt-Boosting Jeans.
Because of my outsider status, I often find truth within Didion’s bleak view of New York, along with the floating stereotypes of the city’s inhabitants as unfriendly. I find it paradoxical that my friends from the area often question why I left the white sands of sunny Florida for the Bronx — two places that could not be more dissimilar to each other — yet turn around to defend the superiority of New York viciously. I remember one of my past roommates trying to convince me that New York is no worse or more unfriendly than any other city in America but then I found her in our room a few days later singing along soulfully to the grim lyrics of LCD Soundsystem’s “New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down” on repeat.
I understand New York and its fast-paced lifestyle brakes for no one, yet my feelings of alienation plagued me most behind Rose Hill’s gates, making my freshman year nightmarish.
Adjustment was difficult. I struggled to make friends. I grew tired of crumbling alleyways, longing for palm trees instead. I looked into transferring, but I decided to tough it out.
“I cried in elevators and in taxis and in Chinese laundries,” Didion wrote in her “Goodbye” essay, “I had never before understood what despair meant, and I am not sure that I understand now, but I understood that year.”
I think I understood despair when I found a spitball in my hair after my second Comp II class during my first fall semester and later learned that a number of the students had come from the same New England prep school. I think I understood it when I was caught in a train delay this summer, squeezed in a crowded subway car for almost half an hour, holding heavy groceries, wishing I could just get in my car at home and drive without stopping instead of being at the mercy of the MTA. I think I understood it when a boy who lived in my freshman year dorm would take things off my desk and stick them down his pants.
I found that I was not alone in my sorrow. My friend understood it when she called her dad nearly every night her first semester, crying in the stairwell. Another friend understood it too, going home every weekend to Philadelphia for a month to escape it.
Two years later, things are a bit brighter. The freshman blues are gone. I know who to stay away from now.
On a bad day I am Didion, wanting to escape. But on a good day, I am E.B White, regarding New York with the same excitement he displays in his essay. “Here is New York.”
“There are roughly three New Yorks,” White declares, he describes the New York of the native and the New York of the commuter. “Third,” he concludes, “there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last — the city of final destination, the city that is a goal.”
Megan Cattel FCRH ’15, is an international studies major from Tampa Fla.
