Being a New Yorker

I must confess something. Sometimes New York appears to me as a very strange city. This is not bad nor good. It is something beyond good and evil. I'm talking about a subjective experience, a perception of the society around you, and the internal feeling that it produces. How after a night of drinks and laugh turns next day as an ephemeral moment without consequence. It appears in my imagination and memory as a dream. The sense of reality, of here and now, is blurred with this apparent sensation of alienation. This nihilistic state of the mind and the soul is frequent in New York after a very emotional and self-rewarding experience. Or at least it is how I perceive it.

I think this strange spiritual tension between I as a subject, and the world that surrounds me has something to do with the speed of time and the enormous and complex amount of diversity present in New York. Maybe it's common to other people in other cities, but I can only speak it from the place where I live. Diversity in a city like New York overwhelms you. First it is extremely charming. The impressions that leave in the mind are of excitement and discovery. Every person is like an ambassador from distant lands. It's a place where you get into context with the rest of the world. My conclusion is that for the subject, the I, is an overreaching society that remembers you that you are an individual. Even more, it's a society that makes you individual. Whereas in other societies, smaller, less diverse, the sense of community, the sharing of symbols and a common feeling gives you a strong identity. In New York you are forced to be the author of your identity, or fall into an immense loneliness. The charm of diversity gives you food for adventure, and a quest to embrace the world in every single person you meet. It's a universal place where humanity as an amorphous body meets, which means that there is no community at all. No holding from an ancestry or a culture. When something embraces everything, it excludes nothing, and the unity of identity is lost when finding yourself unopposed by nothing. Identity depends also on identifying what you are not. In New York you could be anything, there is no possibility of exclusion. You must determine yourself, which somehow speaks of freedom, but it also requires strength and character. Otherwise you are lost.

In a city where you are exclusively an individual, where you can't hold yourself to a community, the danger of falling into nihilism and loneliness is high. Sometimes I move between both, between the strength of character to form my identity independent from anything else, and the strange feeling of losing yourself in an unstoppable flux of events and people. In New York everything goes fast, time is filled with emotions, experiences and persons. When you turn your attention to your past, the collection of events is so big that you realize how fast you must move in order to survive. This survival is not a matter of life and death. It's a survival of remaining in the unity of your identity, and not dismembering it into unintelligible pieces. The speed of time is enhanced by the number of experiences and people you get in contact with. Overcoming the danger of being lost is the daily experience that forms the New Yorker. If there is unity in the identity of the New Yorker, it's his capacity to form himself everyday in a society which diversity breaks any possible sense of community. The device many of us use is distinguishing ourselves by reflecting on our background, by remembering where we or our family came from (another country or another State). Even a born New Yorker reflects on this family background.

The point is, the danger of diversity for the subject is his weakness in failing to determine himself in the most complex way almost every single day. Otherwise loneliness is a punishment for those that are too nostalgic. Never mind why New York is a city of eight millions of individual persons.