Second Thoughts

I realized yesterday that it takes about 7 minutes to walk to Central Park from my apartment, and on any given Sunday you can expect lawns scattered with frolicking dogs, strollers with wheels that are increasingly absurdly large, smoking hipsters, earnest, frowning scholars, old men in brown hats, couples in canoes, athletic men hopping over each other like gymnasts for show, Sunday-times-reading businessmen, friends in circles at a picnic, sand volleyball players, religious ceremonies replete with sitar music, games of ultimate frisbee, engaged people from foreign countries taking their wedding photos, gray-haired men who play chess on stone tables, which look over into a park from a high-standing veranda, and quartets playing jazz for new families who want to educate their three-year-old son, so they hold his hands over his head and bounce him around like he’s dancing.

Really, it’s any day with Sun that inspires this symphony of behavior.

I sat on a sloped lawn in the partial shade and read a poorly-translated Japanese novel (the writing in English is barely serviceable and I know it’s a good book, so I’m inferring) by Banana Yoshimito called N.P., which stands for “North Point” and which is about young people who meet, discover their mutual, secret love for this rare book of stories (also titled N.P.), and metaphorically relive its legacy of secrecy and suicide, only to triumph in the healing message of the final story. Despite the translation, there is an almost adolescent happiness/sadness conjoinment to the writing that makes it perfect for a Sunday, in which one feels happy for the sun and melancholy for the nostalgia of a lost afternoon. On weekends one is unusually, closely aware of the passing of time, and in some instances it’s a feeling that the time is draining away. For me, it brings me back to the memory and nostalgia of adolescence, that “riotous country” from which there’s “a type of cultural news that can be delivered only by those who’ve recently crossed over”, as Jay McInery wrote in the times a while ago, describing Benjamin Kunkel’s novel Indecision. In any case, it’s fun to remember those days, and read about characters who still live with the up/down intensity of their gravity. When one’s emotional life and aesthetic concerns are the center of the world. I’ll never stop romanticizing that time, and it’s the reason why I am prone to sentimentality, and why I listen to Tilly and the Wall (who are a band that sing about teenage love and adventure, with a woman who tap dances for percussion), and find myself agreeing earnestly with the urgency of their affections (rather than merely observing them).

All of this to say in reminder to myself: get out of the apartment on the weekends and visit the most completely happy place in New York, because you live under ten minutes walk away; and, now is the time of life to pretend like you’re still seventeen. Because later, it’s going to seem a little bit absurd.