A New York type of lost

Just walkWhen Auster, very early in his book, discusses the feeling of walking through New York City, I immediately said to myself, "Yup, he's got it." There are very few cities as open to foot travel as New York is, and as any New Yorker will tell you, there is no better way to see and experience New York than by walking neighborhood to neighborhood. New York, for all its scale and density, is really made up of the ever-changing details and walking New York gives you a chance to feel those details. At the same time, by focusing on such a small scale of New York, by looking at the individual bricks, graffiti, and windows of New York streets, one loses a sense of where one is. This, to me, is how I understand Auster's description of being "lost." While I may be able to locate myself with my mental map of NYC, the lack of direction allows us to get swallowed up and embraced by New York's wild swings of emotion and aesthetic. While Auster describes New York as the "nowhere" that Quinn had built around himself, he does not mean the place does not exist. Instead, I see it as a decentralization of place. When we get lost in New York and its minute details, we need not have a sense of our own place. New York swallows us whole, and the density of experience and stimulation around us make it unnecessary to say I am one place as opposed to another. We are in New York, totally unspecified, and more a state of mind that a physical location. That is what I see as the nowhere of New York. It may sound scary to a tourist, but there is nothing as intoxicating as New York's energy. It is truly like a drug in the way that it can alter you sense of the here and now. As well, I can overdose on New York's energy and need to escape, but no more than a week away I find myself yearning for it once again. Just walking the streets gives one that feeling. The irresistible energy, movement, and life. Sometimes we fight it, on our way from point A to point B, but other times, when we are open to it, we allow ourselves to get lost much like Quinn. In those moments where we wander without direction, we learn the most about New York and ourselves.