To read E.B. White's essay Here Is New York today, for me, is an exercise in humility. I am one of the thousands he said come to the city "in quest of something...with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart." How he knew me so well in the summer of 1948, writing and sweating in a stuffy, unventilated chamber in a Midtown hotel, is less a testament to his prescience than a reminder that I am anything but a novelty. I didn't even have room for any manuscript in my baggage.
Nearly all of his descriptions of this city still ring true to me; I, who hasn't spent more than a week here since moving from the West Coast. New York is still a vast, concrete world sectioned into distinctive regions, villages and neighborhoods. One can live a complete and contented life within the confines of three city blocks, and never need more services or entertainment than can be found there. This must occur less today than during White's time and before, but surely it's still possible.
The city sounds -- there, the questioning bloop of a curtailed police siren -- float up to me from the floors of the canyons below. Though surrounded by a more substantial level of comfort than White was nearly sixty years ago, I'm sitting in a chamber of my own, inserted an if in a glass drawer into the side of a glass and concrete high-rise apartment building.