A Plea for Eros

and as far as I could tell, adventure lay in the urban wilds of Manhattan, not in the farmland of Minnesota. This was my guiding fiction, and I was determined to make good on it. I had a tiny room in International House, on West 123rd Street at Harlem’s border. My first three days were spent rereading
Crime and Punishment
in a state that closely resembled fever. I couldn’t sleep, because the noise from traffic, sirens, garbage trucks, and exuberant pedestrians outside my window kept me wide awake all night. I had no friends. Was I happy? I was wildly happy. Sitting on my bed, which took up most of the space in that narrow room, I whispered prayers of thanks that I was really and truly
here
in New York, beginning another life. I worshipped the place. I feasted on every beautiful inch of it—the crowds, the fruit and vegetable stands, the miles of pavement, the graffiti, even the garbage. All of it sent me into paroxysms of joy. Needless to say, my elation had an irrational cast to it. Had I not arrived laden with ideas of urban paradise, I might have felt bad losing sleep, might have felt lonely and disoriented, but instead I walked around town like a love-struck idiot, inhaling the difference between
there
and
here.
I had never seen anything like New York, and its newness held the promise of my future: dense with the experience I craved—romantic, urbane, intellectual. Looking back on that moment, I believe I was saved from disappointment by the nature of my “great expectations.” I honestly wasn’t burdened with conventional notions of finding security or happiness. At that time of my life, even when I was “happy,” it wasn’t because I expected it. That was for characters less romantic than myself. I didn’t expect to be rich, well fed, and kindly treated by all. I wanted to live deeply and fully, to embrace whatever the city held for me, and if this meant a few emotional bruises, even a couple of shocks, if it meant not eating too well or too often, if it meant a whole slew of awful jobs, so be it.
    It appears that time has turned that young woman, who imagined herself a romantic heroine, into something of a comic character, but I remain fond of her. We are relatives, after all. Like all the places where I’ve actually lived, New York City is much more than a “context” or “setting” for me. Within weeks of my arrival in New York, I was someone else, not because there had been a revolution in my psychological makeup or any trauma. It was simply this: people saw me in a light in which I had never been seen before. Although I had always felt at home with my parents and sisters, I was never really comfortable with my peers. By the time I found myself in college, my feeling that I was not inside but outside had intensified. There’s no question that I cultivated this to some degree, that I prided myself on my difference, but I confess it hurt and surprised me to be regarded as “strange.” I had friends I loved and teachers I loved, but rumors in which I was variously characterized as wild, monkishly studious, or just plain weird haunted my career as a college student. I recall my father telling me with a smile that one of his students had described me as “very unique.” In New York, this all but ended. Whatever exoticism I may have possessed came from my midwestern sincerity and lack of worldly sophistication. Transformations of the self are related to
where
you are, and identity
is
dependent on others. In Minnesota, I felt embattled. I rebelled against a culture that touted “niceness” above truth, that wallowed in an idea of “equality” that had come to mean “sameness” and “intolerance”—not of the sick, dying, ugly, or handicapped but of those who distinguished themselves by talent or beauty or intelligence. The “hoity-toity” were really batted around out there. Pretension wasn’t suffered for an instant, and for a girl who walked around dreaming she was a combination of George Eliot and Nora Charles in
The Thin Man,
life could be hard. In Minnesota, I lusted after every quality that was in short supply—artifice, irony, flamboyant theatricality, fierce intellectual debate, and brilliantly painted lips.
    In New York, “niceness” wasn’t an overriding value, but then neither was “goodness,” a value I frankly and unashamedly clung to for dear life. I had to reorient myself to accommodate a new world. For example, I naively assumed that most people had had some