City Topics

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive. At the feet of the tallest and plushest offices lie the crummiest slums. The genteel mysteries housed in the Riverside Church are only a few blocks from the voodoo charms of Harlem. The merchant princes, riding to Wall Street in their limousines down the East River Drive, pass within a few hundred yards of the gypsy kings; but the princes do not know they are passing the kings, and the kings are not up yet anyway—they live a more leisurely life than the princes and get drunk more consistently.
—E.B. (Elwyn Brooks)

crew member [offscreen]: That’s an awful big town San Francisco.
Weinberg: Strictly a one-whistle stop. There’s only one city in the USA and that’s New York.
Chief Sergeant: Oh, you’re just another hometown hick, Weinberg. What’s wrong with California?
Weinberg: California. The sun shines and nothing happens. Before you know it, you’re sixty years old.
Chief Sergeant: It’s no different from New York. My sister’s been tryin’ to get out of Brooklyn for the last forty years.
Weinberg: Brooklyn. That ain’t New York, Chief. Once you cross that Brooklyn Bridge, you’re out of this world. The only noise you hear is the hardening of your arteries. You know when I used to drive a hack, I had a pal who crossed that bridge back in 1929 and ain’t never heard from him since.
—Dudley Nichols (1895–1960)

Goethe’s whole education and life were those of the artist. He lacks the unconsciousness of the poet. In his autobiography he describes accurately the life of the author of Wilhelm Meister. For as there is in that book, mingled with a rare and serene wisdom, a certain pettiness or exaggeration of trifles, wisdom applied to produce a constrained and partial and merely well-bred man,—a magnifying of the theatre till life itself is turned into a stage, for which it is our duty to study our parts well, and conduct with propriety and precision,—so in the autobiography, the fault of his education is, so to speak, its merely artistic completeness. Nature is hindered, though she prevails at last in making an unusually catholic impression on the boy. It is the life of a city boy ... defrauded of much which the savage boy enjoys.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)