Loving and Hating New York

1 Those ad campaigns celebrating the Big Apple2, those T-shirts with a heart design proclaiming "I love New York," are signs, pathetic in their desperation, of how the mighty has fallen. New York City used to leave the bragging to others, for bragging was "bush粗俗的，乡土气的." Being unique, the biggest and the best, New York didn't have to assert how special it was.

2 It isn't the top anymore, at least if the top is measured by who begets产生，引起 the styles and sets the trends. Nowadays New York is out of phase with American taste as often as it is out of step with American politics.III.1 Once it was the nation's undisputed fashion authority, but it too long resisted the incoming casual style and lost its monopoly. No longer so looked up to or copied, New York even prides itself on being a holdout坚固据点A.1 from prevailing American trendsIII.2, a place to escape Common Denominator Land3.

3 Its deficiencies缺乏，不足 as a pacesetter标兵，领头人 are more and more evident. A dozen other cities have buildings more inspired architecturally than any built in New York City in the past twenty years. The giant Manhattan television studios where Toscanini4's NBC Symphony5 once played now sit empty most of the time, while sitcoms情景喜剧 cloned复制，克隆 and canned in Hollywood8, and the Johnny Carson show liveA.2, preempt取代，占据…的位置 the airways from CaliforniaC.1.
Tin Pan Alley6 has moved to Nashville7 and Hollywood.C.2 HollywoodB.1 Tin Pan AlleyB.2
Vegas9 casinos赌场，娱乐场 routinely pay heavy sums to singers and entertainers whom no nightspot夜总会 in Manhattan can afford to hire. In sports, the bigger superdomes超级穹顶体育馆, the more exciting teams, the most enthusiastic fans, are often found elsewhere.

4 New York was never a good convention city—being regarded as unfriendly, unsafe, overcrowded, and expensive—but it is making something of a comeback as a tourist attraction.III.4 Even so, most Americans would probably rate New Orleans, San Francisco, Washington, or Disneyland10 higher. A dozen other cities, including my hometown of Seattle, are widely considered better cities to live in.
DisneylandB.7

5 Why, then, do many Europeans call New York their favorite city? They take more readily than do most Americans to its cosmopolitan complexities, its surviving, aloof, European standards, its alien mixtures. Perhaps some of these Europeans are reassured by the sight, on the twin fashion avenues of MadisonB.3 and FifthB.4, of all those familiar international names—the jewelers, shoe stores, and designer shops that exist to flatter and bilk欺骗，蒙骗 the frivolous rich. But no; what most excites Europeans is the city's chargedA.3, nervous atmosphere, its vulgar dynamism活力，精力.

6 New York is about energy, contention, and striving. And since it contains its share of articulate losers, it is also about mockery, the put-down贬低的话，反驳A.4, the loser's shrug ("Whaddya gonna do?"). It is about constant battles for subway seats, for a cabdriver's or a clerk's or a waiter's attention, for a foothold立足点，据点, a chance, a better address, a larger billing. To win in New York is to be uneasyIII.5; to lose is to live in jostling推挤，拥挤 proximity亲近，接近 to the frustrated majority.

7 New York was never Mecca to me.C.3 And though I have lived there more than half my life, you won't find me wearing an "I Love New York" T-shirt. But all in all, I can't think of many places in the world I'd rather live. It's not easy to define why.

8 Nature's pleasures are much qualified in New York.III.6 You never see a star-filled sky; the city's bright glow arrogantly obscures使模糊，使变暗 the heavensIII.7. Sunsets can be spectacular: oranges and reds tinting给…着色 the sky over the Jersey11 meadows and gaudily华丽俗气地 reflected in a thousand windows on Manhattan's jagged锯齿状的 skyline空中轮廓线. Nature constantly yields to man in New York: witness those fragile sidewalk trees gamely不屈不挠地 struggling against encroaching侵占的 cement and petrol fumes.C.4
Central Park, which Frederick Law Olmsted12 designed as lungs for the city's poor, is in places grassless and filled with trash, no longer pristine纯洁的，未受污染的 yet lively with the noise and vivacity活泼，生机 of people, largely youths, blacks, and Puerto Ricans13, enjoying themselves. On park benches sit older people, mostly white, looking displaced. It has become less a tranquil平静的 park than an untidy carnival狂欢，热闹.

9 Not the glamour魅力，吸引力 of the city, which never beckoned招手，召唤 to me from a distance, but its opportunity—to practice the kind of journalism I wanted—drew me to New York. I wasn't even sure how I'd measure upA.5 against others who had been more soundly educated at Ivy League schools, or whether I could compete against that tough local breed, those intellectual sons of immigrants, so highly motivated and single-minded, such as Alfred Kazin14, who (for heaven's sake!) played Bach15's Unaccompanied Partitas on the violin.

10 A testing of oneself, a fear of giving in to the most banal平庸的，陈腐的 and marketable of one's talents, still draws many of the young to New York. That and, as always, the company of others fleeing something constricting where they came from. Together these young share a freedom, a community of inexpensive amusements, a casual living, and some rough times. It can't be the living conditions that appeal, for only fond memory will forgive the inconvenience, risk, and squalor肮脏，悲惨. Commercial BroadwayB.5 may be inaccessible to them, but there is off-Broadway, and then off-off-Broadway. If painters disdain Madison Avenue's plush豪华的 art galleries, Madison Avenue dealers set up shop in the grubby肮脏的 precincts区域，范围 of Soho. But the purity of a bohemian波希米亚式的 dedication can be exaggerated.III.8 The artistic young inhabit the same Greenwich VillageB.6 and its fringes边缘 in which the experimentalists in the arts lived during the Depression, united by a world against them. But the present generation is enough of a subculture亚文化群 to be a source of profitable boutiques精品店 and coffeehouses. And it is not all that estranged疏远的.

11 Manhattan is an island cut off in most respects from mainland America, but in two areas it remains dominant. It is the banking and the communications headquarters for America. In both these roles it ratifies批准，认可 more than it creates.III.9 Wall StreetB.8 will advance the millions to make a Hollywood movie only if convinced that a bestselling title or a star name will ensure its success. The networks' news centers are here, and the largest book publishers, and the biggest magazines—and therefore the largest body of critics to appraise the films, the plays, the music, the books that others have created. New York is a judging town, and often invokes standards that the rest of the country deplores痛惜，悔恨 or ignores. A market for knowingness exists in New York that doesn't exist for knowledge.

12 The ad agencies are all here too, testing the markets and devising the catchy引人注目的 jingles押韵广告词A.6 that will move millions from McDonald's to Burger King, so that the ad agency's "creative director" can lunch instead in Manhattan's expense-accountA.7 French restaurants. The bankers and the admen广告员, the marketing specialists and a thousand well-paid ancillary附属的，辅助的 service people, really set the city's brittle尖利的 tone—catering to a wide American public whose numbers must be respected but whose tastes do not have to be shared. The condescending故意屈尊的 view from the fiftieth floor of the city's crowds below cuts these people off from humanity. So does an attitude which sees the public only in terms of large, malleable可塑的 numbers—as impersonally as does the clattering subway turnstile十字转门 beneath the office towers.

13 I am surprised by the lack of cynicism, particularly among the younger ones, of those who work in such fields. The television generation grew up in the insistent presence of hype炒作，夸张宣传III.10, delights in much of it, and has no scruples顾虑，迟疑 about practicing it. Men and women do their jobs professionally, and, like the pilots who from great heights bombed Hanoi16, seem unmarked by it. They lead their real lives elsewhere. In the Village bars they are indistinguishable in dress or behavior from would-be artists, actors, and writers. The boundaries of "art for art's sake" aren't so rigid anymore; art itself is less sharply defined, and those whose paintings don't sell do illustrationsA.8; those who can't get acting jobs do commercialsA.9; those who are writing ambitious novels sustain themselves on the magazinesIII.11. Besides, serious art often feeds on the popular these days, changing it with fond irony.

14 In time the newcomers find or form their own worlds; Manhattan is many such worlds, huddled together but rarely interacting. I think this is what gives the city its sense of freedom. There are enough like you, whatever you are. And it isn't as necessary to know anything about an apartment neighbor—or to worry about his judgment of you—as it is about someone with an adjoining相连的，邻接的 yard. In New York, like seeks like, and by economy of effort excludes the rest as strangers. This distancing, this uncaring in ordinary encountersA.10, has another side: in no other American city can the lonely be as lonely.

15 So much more needs to be said. New York is a wounded city, declining in its amenities宜人之处, overloaded by its tax burdens. But it is not a dying city; the streets are safer than they were five years ago; Broadway, which seemed to be succumbing屈服，屈从 to the tawdriness廉价花哨 of its environment, is astir活动的 againIII.12.

16 The trash-strewn散布的 streets, the unruly schools, the uneasy feeling of menace, the noise, the brusqueness唐突，粗鲁—all confirm outsiders in their conviction that they wouldn't live here if you gave them the place. Yet show a New Yorker a splendid home in Dallas, or a swimming pool and cabana简易浴室 in Beverly Hills17, and he will be admiring but not envious. So much of well-to-do America now lives antiseptically超然地，冷静地 in enclaves飞地，聚居区, tranquil and luxurious, that shut out the world.C.5 Too static, the New Yorker would say. Tell him about the vigor of your outdoor pleasures; he prefers the unhealthy hassle混乱，麻烦 and the vitality of urban life. He is hopelessly provincial. To him, New York—despite its faults, which he will impatiently concede ("So what else is new?")—is the spoiler of all other American cities.

17 It is possible in twenty other American cities to visit first-rate art museums, to hear good music and see lively experimental theater, to meet intelligent and sophisticated people who know how to live, dine, and talk well; and to enjoy all this in congenial适合的，相宜的 and spacious surroundings. The New Yorker still wouldn't want to live there.

18 What he would find missing is what many outsiders find oppressive and distasteful about New York—its rawness, tension, urgency; its bracing振奋精神的 competitiveness; the rigor严厉，苛刻 of its judgments; and the congested拥挤的, democratic presence of so many other New Yorkers, encased in their own worlds. The defeated are not hidden away somewhere else on the wrong side of town.III.13C.6
In the subways, in the buses, in the streets, it is impossible to avoid people whose lives are harder than yours. With the desperate, the fatigued, the ill, the overwhelmed, one learns not to strike up conversation (which isn't wanted) but to make brief, sympathetic eye contact, to include them in the human race. It isn't much, but it is the fleeting hospitality of New Yorkers, each jealous of his privacy in the crowd. Even helpfulness is often delivered as a taunt嘲笑，嘲弄: a man, rushing the traffic light, dashes in front of an oncoming car. "Watch it, Mac," shouts the man behind him. "You want to be wearing a Buick with Jersey plates?"—great scorn in the word Jersey, home of drivers who don't belong here.

19 By definition, New York is a mongrel（贬）杂种，混合的 city. It is in fact the first truly international metropolis大都会. No other great city—not London, Paris, Rome, or Tokyo—plays host (or hostage) to so many nationalities. The mix is much wider—Asians, Africans, Latins—than when that tumultuous骚乱的，吵闹的 variety of Europeans crowded ashore at Ellis Island18. The newcomers are never fully absorbed, but are added precariously不安全地 to the undigested many.

20 New York is too big to be dominated by any group, by Wasps or Jews or blacks, or by Catholics of many origins—Irish, Italian, Hispanic. All have their little sovereignties, all are sizable enough to be reckoned with and tough in asserting their claims, but none is powerful enough to subdue the others. Characteristically, the city swallows up the United Nations and refuses to take it seriously, regarding it as an unworkable mixture of the idealistic, the impractical, and the hypocritical.C.7 But New Yorkers themselves are in training in how to live together in a diversity of races—the necessary initiation into the future.

21 The diversity gives endless color to the city, so that walking in it is a constant education in sights and smells. There is a wonderful variety of places to eat or shop, and though the most successful of such places are likely to be touristy hybrid混合的 compromises, they too have genuine roots. Other American cities have ethnic turfs地盘，势力范围 jealously defended, but not, I think, such an admixture混合物 of groups, thrown together in such jarring juxtapositions并列，并置. In the same way, avenues of high-riseA.11 luxury in New York are never far from poverty and meanA.12 streets. The sadness and fortitude坚韧，刚毅 of New York must be celebrated, along with its treasures of art and music. The combination is unstable; it produces friction, or an uneasy forbearance容忍，忍耐 that sometimes becomes a real toleration.

22 Loving and hating New York becomes a matter of alternating moods, often in the same day. The place constantly exasperates激怒，恼怒, at times exhilarates鼓舞，使振奋.III.14 To me, it is the city of unavoidable experience. Living there, one has the reassurance of steadily confronting life.