Beautiful Symmetry

There is a hardback copy of The Collected Essays of E.B. White sitting at home, nestled as close kin on the shelf between Charlotte’s Web and Lawrence Weschler’s “Calamities of Exile.” It contains this piece, “Here is New York,” which in itself contains some of my very favorite words.

And yet, despite owning it already, for the third time, I felt compelled to buy this slim, stand-alone volume. 

The first copy I owned, I had lent to someone right in the heart of New York, a short-term loan I expected to receive back. But circumstance pushed us apart, and there was a long period of cold darkness between us. Last fall, when circumstance brought us together again and I saw it lying on a shelf in her apartment, she offered it back, but I refused.  It just didn’t feel right. That beauty was hers now.

I didn't tell her, but I had already bought another copy. 

And I had given that one away too. 

That second copy was willingly bestowed to another beautiful woman. She missed New York, so I read it aloud to her. The way White reminisced about New York made her cry. His words made me cry too, as they had done so often in the past. But in that moment it was more for the joy I saw it bring her. I wanted to be nowhere else – definitely not New York - just there, speeding along some foreign road, as far from New York as I had ever been in my life. I gifted that copy to her, knowing I would never see it again. That beauty was hers now too.

I didn’t buy another copy, and that was the last time I had read the essay.

So now, a year later, when a co-worker asked me to order her a children’s book titled “This is New York,” the title sparked all of those memories, and E.B. was very suddenly on my mind again. 

For a third time, I bought this particular version of White’s essay.  

But that I should pick up this book again felt fateful, given the trajectory of my week. It had already been one of sober reflection, one that began with me sitting in a park in the city, the very place where I last got fucked up (and with one of those women too). I spent that evening blankly staring into the ghostly phantasm of my past, seeing how, in that focused moment of clarity, my life had been cleft in two, where the old me had been drowned out and the new me had struggled to breathe in its new existence. 

I could see myself, a year younger and fucked up, sitting in the dugout of the park, absently staring into a Styrofoam cup half full of warm Coors Light spoiling between my feet, telling myself something had to give. That this life was not sustainable. 

I could see how I struggled, how I couldn’t bring myself to walk away, so I just sat on the trunk of my car for over an hour, staring at the bar, imagining the chaos inside and asking myself “Why?”

I couldn’t answer that simple question, so I turned my back on it all.  

I spent this Saturday night alone, just that slim volume and a wonderful dinner of wild boar, soaking in White’s simple prose and reflecting on the past year.

An entire year of sobriety.

I once heard Weschler describe the work of Joseph Mitchell, another post-war New York writer, as being “so natural, it’s like breathing.” It seems like a fitting description of White’s essay – simple words, yes, but so natural, so easy, it’s difficult not to be lulled by them.  

"A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain illusive. At the feet of the tallest and plushiest offices lie the crummiest slums. The genteel mysteries housed in the Riverside Church are only a few blocks from the voodoo charms of Harlem. The merchant princes, riding to Wall Street in their limousines down the East River Drive, pass within a few hundred yards of the gypsy kings; but the princes do not know they are passing kings, and the kings are not up yet anyway-- they live a more leisurely life than the princes and get drunk more consistently..."

I finished the lithe little book, took it outside, and set it on a sidewalk table. The night air felt like a reprieve from the weight of the past.  

Sometime in the night, a woman sat down next to me, asked what I was reading. I showed her, said it was my favorite book. She seemed interested, so I explained how I’d given my first two copies to beautiful women, women that I was in love with, women who have since begun a slow, tidal drift away from me. 

I looked down at the book, contemplated the year in that moment, and in all that chaos, I saw some kind of sad, beautiful symmetry. 

I slid this third copy across the table, and I told her to take it. 

“It seems only fitting, that I should give it to another beautiful woman.” 

I think she was caught off guard. She thanked me, and promised to return it.

I told her not to bother. 

I'll always find another copy...