I chose Philadelphia as my home 20 years ago, but I will always be a New Yorker. To a NYer, every city is always cheaper and cleaner, and quieter, but there is more to us than that perception of other cities, and yeah that smugness too many of us have, when regarding other cities, and, really, all other places that are not NY.
On behalf of NYers, I’m sorry. I am not smug about it, or else I’d be desperately clinging to a $2000 a month room on the Upper West Side. I am a bit more practical.
When we speak of “the city” we mean Manhattan. "The Island" is Long Island; Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens are themselves, and Staten Island doesn’t exist. New Yorkers are definitely a special breed, not unlike other city dwellers, but NYC brings a different sort of character, even to those of us who grew up in the suburbs and merely spent lots of days there. NYers develop powerful sensory filters.
We filter out the sights, smells and sounds of NY. With great effort, we filter through the chaos and block it from penetrating our brains, and yet, we are surrounded by white noise, and beholden to rainbow lights at all hours of the day. The Symphonous and, more often, cacophonous smells bombard us continuously. Perhaps we even filter out the taste, but evidence is sparse in this regard.
After all, ask a NYer about pizza or bagels from any other place and they can tell you in great detail just why it isn’t as good as what they can find in New York. They will then launch into a lengthy monologue, intricately describing the textures, the aroma, the spicing, the sauce consistency, quantity of cheese or other toppings, etc. The chewiness, quantity of toppings, balance between cream cheese and lox, etc. Of course, this is only if you push, because generally we just say “this sucks,” and move on with our lives.
For some 20 years of my life I took this for granted, growing up on “the Island” but spending a great deal of time in “the city.” For Long Island kids, it is a rite of passage to take the Long Island Railroad and spend a day in “the city” without adults. Most of us pass this milestone around the age of 14, granting us a sense of independence that seems only to be exceeded by the city kids themselves, who are hopping subways from their single digit years. This allows us to develop rather robust and effective filters, and a strong sense of our selves as participants in a vast whirling, noisy world. Others develop a sense of self in their own world, but definitely not the same filters.
I never quite understood this until I spent a summer backpacking in Europe, and particularly spent a month in this cluster of Hungarian villages called Kal/Kapolna/Nagyut.
They were rural villages, clustered on a rail line, some 80 or so kilometers from Budapest. It was ancient, inhabited space, as we took a short trip to Roman ruins the second day I arrived, and the past is in this place and space, for sure.
Surrounding the villages were vast fields of crops and produce, as this was a rural village. At one point I remember walking out into the sunflower fields, taking in a site of near infinite flow of sunflowers off to the horizon and being struck by their beauty, with the slow and gentle breeze flowing past the stalks and into my ears. The sky was blue with some puffy clouds in the air. It was beautiful, and I snapped a picture (below).
One week, I stayed with a family in Nagyut, a name that means "Big Street." It's a town called "Big Street." They were devout Baptists, and it was harvest time. This lovely family fed me farm fresh foods each morning, and worked all day and night to bring in the harvest, except when it was time for church. I’d look out on the fields and hear the rhythm of their tools swinging and cutting, and the occasional sound of the motor running, all the more clear for the silence around us. It was very quiet there, though I did not think on that. My first and last week I stayed with a host family near the end of the street in Kal, across from the train line; the train’s frequent passing barely registered on my filter-trained ears, the weeks I was there, though it was certainly an interruption of the stillness of village life. As I explored the village of Kal in that last week, I came upon a fenced off cemetery near the train tracks. It was a bit overgrown and ill tended, seemingly abandoned by the families of those buried there. Looking more closely at the stones, I saw Hebrew writing on them, and realized I was looking at a Jewish cemetery, slowly being reclaimed by the grasses of nature.
During my whole month in the three villages, I never encountered a single Jewish person, and I realized just how quiet certain things can be, how silence can mean many things...
Eventually, my European summer ended, and I was headed home. I flew into Newark airport and my parents picked me up and whisked me back to “the island.” Within a couple of days I was taking the Long Island Railroad back into “the city.” When I emerged from Penn Station and began walking to Times Square, it hit me….
During that month in the three Hungarian villages, amidst sunflower fields and untended Jewish cemeteries, I had lost my filter. The full force of NY hit me, overwhelmed me. Noises, sounds, sights, lights, all of it bombarding my sensory apparatus and leaving me tired. I realized at that moment what so many others see when they come to NY, how NY can excited and animate the spirit and soul. I had lived in a village where a family “never slept” during Harvest time, but returned to a “city that never sleeps” all the time. It was overwhelming and revelatory. I understood the mystique of this place, and the exhaustion of this place.
The tranquility of Kal, Kapolna, and Nagyut has given me a beautiful sense of peace, but there was more.
There is a silence in that place, a silence in those three villages, whose truth is more overwhelming than the lights, sights, sounds and smells of NY. It is in the Jewish cemetery. It is the story of a silencing of voices and the quiet of the dead.
NY is overwhelming, but it is not silent. There is death in NY, but not silence.
There can be death in the peace and quiet, as much as there can be life in the overwhelming, exhausting sights, sounds, and smells of NY.
Life can find renewal in silence, or in cacophonous rapturous chaos. Where we reside or live helps us filter out our world, but it can also make us filter out our truths. I understood the sensory reality of NY after my experience in Hungary, but writing about that experience made me understand the historical reality of silence in Kal, Kapolna, Nagyut and yes, even the historical reality along the brightly lit white-noise-filled “Great White Way” in “the city.”
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