even*cleveland: imaginary outfit: one year in new york

imaginary outfit: one year in new york

The full title of this little ensemble was going to be 'Sean and Stephanie Celebrating One Year In New York By Going Out For Tasty Mini Lox Bagels at Russ & Daughters' but Blogger flat-out balked at the length so I abridged.

Believe it or not, today marks the one year anniversary of our move to New York.

Just about every day for the last 365 days, one or the other of us has gotten quiet and saucer-eyed for a moment and poked the other one and fiercely whispered: CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS? Can you believe that it is us, here? Here, in this wonderful place? This past year has felt like waking up. Our apartment is tiny. Everything is terribly, frighteningly expensive. I still don't have a full time job. Strange and horrifying smells and rodents of unusual size are not unfamiliar. The sheer mass of humanity is intimidating. And still, it is wonderful. The act of living here has been so intensely engrossing and engaging that it feels like a revelation. Like Dorothy walking through the door into the technicolor world. And beneath this intoxicating exhilaration, we both, finally, have been able to relax. No more wishing we were somewhere else. We are engaged with here, and here is plenty because we love it.

So, we celebrate tomorrow with bagels. One year.

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

V. Woolf

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

Italo Calvino

Why didn't she try collecting something? It didn't matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end to the little curiosities one could easily pick up.

Henry James

imaginary outfit: one year in new york

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