Collected Prose

someone’s shoulder.
    The thin men with their briefcases, the voluminous women with their Bibles and devotional pamphlets, the high school kids with their forty-pound textbooks. Trashy novels, comic books, Melville and Tolstoy, How to Attain Inner Peace.
    Looking across the aisle at one’s fellow passengers and studying their faces. Marveling at the variety of skin tones and features, floored by the singularity of each person’s nose, each person’s chin, exulting in the infinite shufflings of the human deck.
    The panhandlers with their out-of-tune songs and tales of woe; the fractious harangues of born-again proselytizers; the deaf-mutes politely placing sign-language alphabet cards in your lap; the silent men who scuttle through the car selling umbrellas, tablecloths, and cheap wind-up toys.
    The noise of the train, the speed of the train. The incomprehensible static that pours through the loudspeaker at each stop. The lurches, the sudden losses of balance, the impact of strangers crashing into one another. The delicate, altogether civilized art of minding one’s own business.
    And then, never for any apparent reason, the lights go out, the fans stop whirring, and everyone sits in silence, waiting for the train to start moving again. Never a word from anyone. Rarely even a sigh. My fellow New Yorkers sit in the dark, waiting with the patience of angels.

    October 11, 2001

NYC = USA

    Every day for a year, I read stories. The stories were short, true, and personal, and they were sent to me by men and women from all over America. On the first Saturday of every month, I would gather up some of my favorite ones and read them aloud on NPR’s Weekend All Things Considered . We called the program the National Story Project , and in that year (October 1999 to October 2000) I received over 4000 submissions. They were written by country people and city people, by old people and young people, by people from all walks of life: farmers and priests, housewives and ex-soldiers, businessmen and doctors, postmen and meter readers, a restorer of player pianos, a trolley-bus driver, and several inmates at state correctional facilities.
    Early on, I noticed a distinct and surprising trend. The only city that anyone ever wanted to talk about was New York. Not just New Yorkers, but people from every part of the country, some of whom had lived here in the past and regretted having moved away, some of whom had visited only once. In nearly every one of their stories, New York wasn’t simply the backdrop for the events that were told, it was the subject of the story itself . Crazy New York, inspiring New York, fractious New York, ugly New York, beautiful New York, impossible New York—New York as the ultimate human spectacle of our time. America has had a tortured, even antagonistic relationship with our city over the years, but to an astonishing number of people from Michigan, Maine, and Nebraska, the five boroughs are a living embodiment of what the United States is all about: diversity, tolerance, and equality under the law. Alone among American cities, New York is more than just a place or an agglomeration of people. It is also an idea.
    I believe that idea took hold in us when Emma Lazarus’s poem was affixed to the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Bartholdi’s gigantic effigy was originally intended as a monument to the principles of international republicanism, but “The New Colossus” reinvented the statue’s purpose, turning Liberty into a welcoming mother, a symbol of hope to the outcasts and downtrodden of the world. New York has continued to represent the spirit of that message, and even today, 116 years after the unveiling of the statue, we still define ourselves as a city of immigrants. With 40 percent of our current population born in foreign countries, we are a cross-section of the entire world. It is a densely crowded ethnic hodge-podge, and the potential for chaos is enormous. No one would contend that we are not bedeviled by a multitude of problems, but when you think of what ethnic differences have done to cities like Sarajevo, Belfast, and Jerusalem, New York stands out as a shining example of civic peace and order.
    The murderous attacks on the World Trade Center last September were rightly construed as an assault against the United States. New Yorkers felt that way, too, but it was our city that was bombed, and even as we wrestled to understand the hateful fanaticism that could lead to the deaths of