Diary

4th August

It's amazing, in a way, that we should so instantly recognise this image.

As if New York wasn't just a city, but a kind of prototype of The City.

A place where nature is defied, for one thing, a place seemingly utterly cut off from the natural world - but which still suffers from a ferocious climate..

which reduces its human inhabitants to utter insignificance - but which could not exist without them.

Our landlady in Nantucket described her first visit to the island on a plane, when she flew over from Hyannis (about a 15 minute flight) when the sun was setting. She said she felt just like a character in an episode of "Survivor" - and she repeated this observation several times - as if this feeling really dignified and gave special meaning to the experience.

Is that what makes it bearable to live in this place?

That kind of self-consciousness of being a character in an imaginary movie? The way, when I was an adolescent, I survived by imagining myself as a character in a novel I was writing as I was going along?

To be sure, the wealth of it is amazing.. the range of food available.. as if the rest of the world was being ransacked of its good things to feed its hungry maw...

Walking its streets I found I wanted to write some kind of epic.. something like the Aeniad that would somehow tell its story to itself and make sense of its existence...

But how could such an epic be told?

What form could possibly do justice to it?

But to be able to tell its story from its beginnings as wilderness to the wilderness it will eventually become..

And I was astonished by the matter of factness with which its inhabitants anticipated its demise. As if another catastrophe was absolutely inevitable.