New York: True North [antikvár]

EDWARD ADLERAuthor of the novel, Notes from a Dark StreetWITNESSLet me get down to the bone. New York is a place on earth impossible to maintain any objectivity about. It is two distinct things to me. I look at it as a writer and I look at it as a city creature trying to make a living, and sometimes both pursuits fuse. This city is the fount of all my art, a source depthless deep, in which all forms are contained, foul and beautiful, dead and living-all effort; all things boil in this city, and, for me, it is the most terrible place on earth, in the gravest use of the word. The city is dying. In terms of my work, I might be Juvenal looking at Rome after the Republic died. The city is the Republic dying. It's unfortunate that we don't have the poets around to record it, a realist and a satirist like Juvenal to get the city down the way he got Rome, and an epigrammatist, like Tacitus.Living in this city, in which I was born, causes my emotions to swing from moments of sheer aesthetic refinement, on the one hand, to terror, on the other. I saw something the other night that really threw me. I was crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. On the Brooklyn side, I saw a bird come to rest, in the afterglow of dusk, perched for a moment on a suspension cable. The bird imposed against the mechanical artifice-this is the city as nature to me. Swing the cycle over. I was driving slowly up Fourth Avenue at about one o'clock in the morning -1 push a hack to help keep me writing-and there was a distinguished-looking, gray-haired man standing stark naked in front of Bible House. Stark naked. Not an instant's attention was paid to him. People passed him by as he stood slapping at his ribs for warmth. The terror is that a city like this can absorb an event so astonishing without a change. It was another proof for me that the Republic is dying, that we have reached a point of dissolution which cannot be reversed.Nevertheless, I love the city with a passion. People always complain that what they face in this city is indifference. I don't believe that to be true. New Yorkers aren't indifferent; it's impossible for them to be, purely because they have to respond to the weight of the external city through which they move. I love it so because it is an external city-in the Miltonic sense. It is a phantasmagoria, ever shifting, its atmosphere made brilliant by the contention of all its elements. We sometimes mistake terror for indifference. The reason people pass this naked man by is, God knows, only some happy trick of circumstance that has deprived them of the opportunity to stand naked before Bible House. To the man whose instincts require nakedness before Bible House, the city will give the need expression. It is one of the conditions of life in this city, just as the bird on the bridge is.The city represents the final state of anarchy. We have all the degradation here that Rome had when the Republic died. The parallels of vice are astonishing; patriotism is dead. The city is so damned human, and, like anything human, it must die. It's dying right before my eyes, but it's dying with a vigor that the world has never before seen.