But in recent years a world of white does no more than replenish my loathing and dread. After a night of snowfall, when snow has heavily but silently settled, I winch up the blinds in the morning and face an antagonist who I half-hoped had forgotten me…Snow hates the old.
There are gradations, true. To this day, reluctantly and with thorough ill grace, I still have to hand it to snow. I don’t want to go out into it (I want to stay indoors with a rug on my lap), and I don’t want it to tell me how old I am; but I do still want to marvel at it, while it’s white and new. The silent element, snow falls silently, and has the other-worldly power to silence a city…
But all that’s over for another year, thank God; and then came spring, and here is summer.
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Hello again, thank you for coming, and welcome back…All right, not back exactly. After a year as wandering freeloaders, as passengers, we’re customers again, and this is our new place, up on the twentieth floor (my sons call it the skypad). And yes thanks, you find me in fairly resilient spirits – for three reasons.
First, my Green Card finally came through, after however many years it’s been. So no more staggering from office to office at the hateful Department of Homeland Security. Tax cuts for the rich don’t trickle down, but moral squalor in high places is the Steamboat Geyser; and the atmosphere in and around the Immigration Court is now one of smug and insolent contempt. On your way into Federal Plaza you can witness teenage doormen jeering at bewildered Hispanic couples because they can’t even speak English…
Second, Trump is in trouble as the mid-term elections loom. Of course, he’s always in trouble, and always will be, for this simple reason: he honestly can’t tell the difference between right and wrong…No, even if he finagles his way to a second term, we have no plans to move to Canada. Trump’s not a reason to leave; he’s a reason to stay. Later tonight I’m joining my immediate family and about two dozen of our American cousins. And that’s what Americans are – my cousins.
Three, the last page of Inside Story is now visible to the naked eye. Finishing a novel is usually the cause of grim satisfaction with a trace of tristesse. But just now the emotions feel rather differently configured…
Anyway, I suppose, my friend, that this will be goodbye. We’ve been through a lot together, and you’ve shown incredible patience and constancy. So let’s mark the occasion by taking an ice bucket and a bottle of wine out on to the roof, where we can watch the sunset.
…Have we got everything? This staircase has no handrail, not yet, and I’ve learnt that approximately 100 per cent of elderly disasters happen on stairs. And even you should be careful, carrying all that. Just two short half-flights and we’ll be there.
You know, in Uruguay, very near our house, there was a nightclub on a sloping lawn and all these young people used to gather at dusk to see the show. And when the sun at last disappeared over the far brim of the South Atlantic they would applaud, every night, with sincerity and gratitude. Very Uruguayan, that, and very sweet we always thought. And vaguely ancient as well as vaguely postmodern. Hang on. Mind the…
New York Harbor.
With Liberty Island in the middle of it. Behold…Lady Liberty often makes me think of Phoebe Phelps – physically, at seventy-five, enormous and weighty, and seemingly without an ounce of superfluous tissue, hard to the touch, like a rubber dinghy stiffly – maximally – inflated. But what’s the opposite of liberty? Subjection. Encumbrance. Thraldom. Lifelong liability (from French lier, ‘to bind’). Well then – Lady Liability…
Whenever I look out there at the whole field of view I find I’ve got myself trapped in a metaphor, because I keep imagining it as a kind of urban Serengeti. Look at all the cranes, the near ones and the ones over there, in New Jersey, look at the exact angle of their necks, and don’t you think for a moment that they’re herds of mechanical giraffes? And those various beasts in and around the water, the hippos of the storage tugs, the great stretching crocs of the barges, the Jurassic diehards of the…Et cetera, et cetera, with further correspondences rather too readily suggesting themselves. It’s known as an ‘epic simile’. But let’s cast off its shackles…
See that plane approaching so low over the water – at helicopter height. It’s a widebody, what the industry calls a heavy. Now to my sensorium it is homing in – with every sign of vicious determination – on Freedom Tower, there, One World Trade Center, the tallest structure in your sight…This trick of the eye is a ‘parallax illusion’, having to do with perceptions of depth. All will right itself the moment the plane passes safely beyond its target. As it does – now…A trick of the eye, and the reflex of a mind conditioned by 2001 – when you were a child. I really should be able to tell the difference, because the planes of September 11 were going about three times faster than that sedate and blameless 767…
Our whole section of downtown Brooklyn is a martyr to the US system of criminal justice. Courthouses and lockups and parole-board fora, and all the go-betweens – bailbondsmen, shyster lawyers, bent attorneys – who work the interface between freedom and its opposite. As well as busloads of police, who then fan out on
