A renowned cultural critic and master of the familiar essay, Joseph Epstein was for many years the editor of The American Scholar magazine and a lecturer in writing at Northwestern University. In "You Take Manhattan" (published in The Middle of My Tether, 1983), he describes the "permanent transience" and "jumpy rhythms" of the city he called home for three years. In the following excerpt from that essay, Epstein employs a series of witty examples to illustrate the outsized attitudes and aspirations of New Yorkers.
from "You Take Manhattan"*
by Joseph Epstein
There are eight million stories in the naked city, as an old television show used to announce, and, before coming to New York to work, I had heard very few of them. I worked on 15th Street, off Union Square, in a building that housed a number of union agents and the old Rand School Library. Hasidic Jews and elderly Mensheviks pottered in and out of the building. In the library, men spent lifetimes getting up the material for books no one wanted to read. I met a jazz critic, a teacher of literature courses at the School of General Education at Columbia University, who referred to his job as "working the lounge at Columbia." More than half the people I came across were at work on a novel, or painted, or sang, or danced. A pants salesman in our apartment building gave up his line to take acting lessons. Accountants were sure to have been Trotskyists in their youth. The city sagged under the weight of aspiration. Yet all this aspiration gave New York an appealing aspect of hope and dreaminess.
The other side of this aspiration--a side that often puts off strangers--is the sheer appalling knowingness of New Yorkers. Delicatessen countermen offer stock-market tips. Cabdrivers are flush with opinions on everything. (Agnes Repplier tells how, many years ago, she once entered a New York cab and announced, "I want to go to Brooklyn." "You mean," the driver corrected her, "you have to.") Even the New York bums seem a bit sharper than their confreres in other cities. I was once stopped on Waverly Place by a youngish panhandler who asked if he could have all my change. Thrown off balance by the originality of his request, I forked over a dollar and twenty cents. But for simple knowingness, for being simultaneously with it, inside it, and yet above it all, I shall never forget a man who one day sat in the chair alongside mine in a New York barbershop. When the barber asked him if he was going to that Sunday's pro football game, he said he hated crowds, and besides they piped the game into his club. Stock market looked bad, the barber said. He had got out last month, the man replied. Supposed to have snowstorms next week, the barber said. He couldn't care less, the man replied; he was off to Florida on Monday. If you told this man that his eyeballs had just dropped out, doubtless he would have responded, no sweat, he had another pair in the car. Clearly, here was a man who, even in hell, would have an air-conditioned room reserved.
In no other city does life seem such a perpetual balancing of debits and credits, of evils and virtues, as it does in New York. No other city seems so charming yet so crude, so civilized yet so uncouth. I recall once going out with two friends to bring back Chinese food from a restaurant on upper Broadway. With the food in hand, we were stopped by a young Puerto Rican drugged to the hairline who wanted the wristwatch worn by one of my friends. We were able to joke him out of it, but the prospect was fraught with danger. Such, paradigmatically, is New York: the prospect of the delight of first-class Chinese food, the danger of having a knife pulled on you while getting it home.
Selected Works of Nonfiction by Joseph Epstein
- Familiar Territory: Observations on American Life (1979)
- Ambition: The Secret Passion (1980)
- The Middle of My Tether: Familiar Essays (1983)
- Once More Around the Block: Familiar Essays (1987)
- A Line Out for a Walk: Familiar Essays (1991)
- With My Trousers Rolled: Familiar Essays (1995)
- Narcissus Leaves the Pool: Familiar Essays (1999)
- Snobbery: The American Version (2002)
- Envy: The Seven Deadly Sins (2003)
- Friendship: An Exposé (2006)
- In a Cardboard Belt!: Essays Personal, Literary, and Savage (2007)
* Originally published in The American Scholar, "You Take Manhattan" was reprinted in The Middle of My Tether: Familiar Essays, by Joseph Epstein, W.W. Norton & Company, 1983.
