Deja Vu

Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City

Tags:

1900,

Chicago,

economics,

New York City,

social climbing

“Bright Lights, Big Internet,” by Bill Wasik, The New York Times, July 31, 2009.

THIS summer, as in so many summers gone by, young aspirants to the creative class — would-be writers, musicians, artists, editors, comedians, performers, thinkers, provocateurs — are stepping off buses in Port Authority and trains in Penn Station, navigating their rented trucks and borrowed cars through outer-borough blocks. These new arrivals come to New York, first and foremost, to find one another, a flock of other young people like themselves. But they come also to seek success, to chase their “big break,” that vague but real moment when, as if by magic, one suddenly finds oneself on the opposite side of the glass from one’s nose print.

Is New York still worth the trip? Recessions tend to be hard on youthful dreams, but this downturn has proved especially dispiriting. Those in the print media have come to see their present fiscal woes as not merely cyclical but structural, and so their slashed workforce and diminished output seem unlikely to rebound any time soon. Galleries have closed. Foundations, their endowments devastated, have cut back on grants for the arts. Internships across the board are down by more than 20 percent. And those of us who still hold full-time jobs in creative fields are clinging to them for dear life, making it difficult for young people to pry any free for themselves.

Meanwhile, another destination beckons, a place that courses with all the raw ambition and creative energy that the hard times seem to have drained from New York. I am referring, of course, to the Internet, which over the past decade has slowly become the de facto heart of American culture: the public space in which our most influential conversations transpire, in which our new celebrities are discovered and touted, in which fans are won and careers made.

Sister Carrie (excerpts), by Theodore Dreiser, 1900.

Chapter I
When a girls leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things.
Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly
assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse. Of an
intermediate balance, under the circumstances, there is no
possibility. The city has its cunning wiles, no less than the
infinitely smaller and more human tempter. There are large forces which
allure with all the soul fullness of expression possible in the most
cultured human. The gleam of a thousand lights is often as effective as
the persuasive light in a wooing and fascinating eye. Half the undoing
of the unsophisticated and natural mind is accomplished by forces
wholly superhuman. A blare of to the astonished scenes in equivocal
terms. Without a counselor at hand to whisper cautious interpretation
what falsehoods may not these things breathe into the unguarded ear!
Unrecognized for what they are, their beauty, like music, too often
relaxes, then wakens, then perverts the simpler human perceptions.

Caroline, or Sister Carrie, as she had been half affectionately termed
by the family, was possessed of a mind rudimentary in its power of
observation and analysis. Self-interest with her was high, but not
strong. It was nevertheless, her guiding characteristic. Warm with the
fancies of youth, pretty with the insipid prettiness of the formative
period, possessed of a figure promising eventual shapeliness and an eye
alight with certain native intelligence she was a fair example of the
middle American class two generations removed from the emigrant. Books
were beyond her interest knowledge a sealed book. In the intuitive
graces she was still crude. She could scarcely toss her head
gracefully. Her hands were almost ineffectual. The feet, though small
were set flatly. And yet she was interested in her charms, quick to
understand the keener pleasures of life, ambitious to gain in material
things. A half-equipped little knight she was, venturing to reconnoiter
the mysterious city and dreaming wild dreams of some vague, far-off
supremacy, which should make it prey and subject the proper penitent,
groveling at a women's slipper….

Chapter XXX
Whatever a man like Hurstwood could be in Chicago, it is very evident
that he would be but an inconspicuous drop in an ocean like New York.
In Chicago, whose population still ranged about 500,000, millionaires
were not numerous. The rich had not become so conspicuously rich as to
drown all moderate incomes in obscurity. The attention of the
inhabitants was not so distracted by local celebrities in the dramatic,
artistic, social, and religious fields as to shut the well-positioned
man from view. In Chicago the two roads to distinction were politics
and trade. In New York the roads were any one of a half-hundred, and
each had been diligently pursued by hundreds, so that celebrities were
numerous. The sea was already full of whales. A common fish must needs
disappear wholly from view--remain unseen. In other words, Hurstwood
was nothing.

There is a more subtle result of such a situation as this, which,
though not always taken into account, produces the tragedies of the
world. The great create an atmosphere which reacts badly upon the
small. This atmosphere is easily and quickly felt. Walk among the
magnificent residences, the splendid equipages, the gilded shops,
restaurants, resorts of all kinds; scent the flowers, the silks, the
wines; drink of the laughter springing from the soul of luxurious
content, of the glances which gleam like light from defiant spears;
feel the quality of the smiles which cut like glistening swords and of
strides born of place, and you shall know of what is the atmosphere of
the high and mighty. Little use to argue that of such is not the
kingdom of greatness, but so long as the world is attracted by this and
the human heart views this as the one desirable realm which it must
attain, so long, to that heart, will this remain the realm of
greatness. So long, also, will the atmosphere of this realm work its
desperate results in the soul of man. It is like a chemical reagent.
One day of it, like one drop of the other, will so affect and discolor
the views, the aims, the desire of the mind, that it will thereafter
remain forever dyed. A day of it to the untried mind is like opium to
the untried body. A craving is set up which, if gratified, shall
eternally result in dreams and death. Aye! dreams unfulfilled--
gnawing, luring, idle phantoms which beckon and lead, beckon and lead,
until death and dissolution dissolve their power and restore us blind
to nature's heart.

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