Sunday, April 8, 2012

reflections on a week in Manhattan...

from the 102nd floor of the Empire State Building looking south...Manhattan is just a large island. not even seven hills to deify or mythologize it, it is all really just a massive human construction.

the Statue of Liberty, as much as it would represent NY and/or the USA, is not old historically, however much it may have sincerely inspired viewers with varying and changing ideas over this time. (even a skeptical steppenwolf recommends the audio tour of the island. well-done, it should perhaps move any heart sympathetic to the human story.) like nearby Ellis Island, mainly for those of "steerage", its meaning has been mostly surpassed by flight, and it is a period piece in fact. a tourist site.

the New York Stock Exchange...so much power is some a comparatively small building!

the UN General Assembly Hall...gathering today almost all the nations of the world...a necessary, understandable gathering...has surely already been compared to the Tower of Babel, probably also to the  ancient Agora of Athens...but it has nonethemore a "flat", horizontal kind of human reality of discourse to it.

"Times Square", for whatever it was in the past, seems to be an empty location of facades, where preponderantly less than thoughtful people photograph a missing meaning.

the memorial site of the World Trade Towers...difficult to imagine the height, but the physicality of the planes crashing into the Towers reminds how of earth-bound we humans are.

St. Patrick's Cathedral seen inside and Park Avenue's shopping street...characteristic contrasts, indeed contradictions, in the human condition: (not only) vertical vs horizontal, otherworldly vs this-worldly.

seeing these and other places in "NYC"...a kind of demythologizing of NY.

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