In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. Those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
In the city, you're always looking around, observing everything. In some neighborhoods, your life can depend on it. The details change constantly.
Everyone who's in America spends the first few years not experiencing it. The person is frightened by the newness of the place and doesn't see things. Her emotional universe becomes the entire universe. And then when she thinks of home, her distance in space can seem like a distance in time.
I've spent my whole life in Chicago being asked where am I from, so that I have a sense of displacement that also is very psychologically disorienting.
Neighborhoods change. In some ways, it's part of the beauty of New York City. It's in a constant state of flux.
If people and their manner of living were alike everywhere, there would not be much point in moving from one place to another.
I know what it's like to be from an incredibly small town and the oppressiveness of it and the desire to get out. But I didn't realize that readers in Seattle, New York, and San Francisco might not get that so instinctively.
If you say city to people, people have no problem thinking of the city as rife with problematic, screwed-up people, but if you say suburbs - and I'm not the first person to say this, it's been said over and over again in literature - there's a sense of normalcy.
The suburb in the 1950s was a bedroom community. The father worked in the city, and the mother stayed home. Now people live and work in the suburbs, and businesses have grown up or moved from cities to certain pockets of what was once the suburbs and created these places that are like cities.
But a city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time.
Places change all the time, and the type of people who live there change.