Letter from New York
New York is a place that goads one into rhapsody, a kind of sickened, not-quite-voluntary hymn. Desperate, admirable people move here in the belief that the city’s grotesque energy will somehow enfranchise their genius, otherwise too dumbly pent within them. Perhaps such faith stems from the awful and exhilarating feeling you get in New York that if anything is going to happen, it is going to happen here. Most of the people you meet are working on a novel. An anthology of these works in progress - these private, sustaining passions - might provide a picture of this world-center more intimate and up-to-date than anything in the most recent copy of The New York Times. Sadly, I can offer no such collection. Instead I present the opening paragraphs of three entirely imaginary novels, each with its own unique defects. I have no intention of pursuing them beyond these first tentative steps; I will allow them to stand as emblems of the possibilities that hover about one everyday in the life-quickening atmosphere of this city, where everything is something trembling on the verge of something else.
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