Goodbye to All That (no more revisions)
The first time I read Joan Didion’s essay “Goodbye to all that” – about her transitory life in New York, and her misery there —- I had just left New York to live in California.
I was very lonely in the West, and her words about being happy in Los Angeles, happier than in New York, where it seemed there were always so many promises that never came through, warmed me during one chilly evening in October when I started to miss home. I thought of her words as I drove to Big Sur and looked out over a high foggy peak into a mass of elephant seals. I thought of her words on my back in the sand in Santa Monica, peeling a tangerine, admiring a gaggle of surfers. The sea was stretched out in front of me as far as I could see. There were no strangers rushing through the rain and the cold, fighting for taxi cabs, no tall gothic buildings impeding the sun. But I was still very lonely. And something about California felt wrong.
Last night, almost 4 months re-settled back in Williamsburg Brooklyn, I came across a revision of Didion’s essay written by Eula Biss. Biss doesn’t state, smartly, in the beginning, that “New York might have been some other city, had circumstances been different and the time been different and had I been different.” Biss does not understand, like Didion, that “Goodbye” is not about a place at all.
New York is neither a place for the rich nor the poor, it is neither a place for the young nor the old. You cannot feasibly write an essay about the largest city in America and determine, from your individual experience, who should live here and why those who live here do. You can make observations about your own interactions, your own loneliness, your bad apartment, your lack of a job. But, as Didion said, New York is “just a city.” You can be here living, or you can be here dying. Brooklyn or not, “where” you are in your twenties and how you feel is just a guise for how much or how little you know about who you are.
