I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together

Photo by Budi Akbarsjah on flickr

Colson Whitehead's The Colossus of New York is hard to pin down as something in particular—fact or fiction, poetry or prose, novel or ethnography, celebratory or scathing—we can certainly say it is about at least a few things: New York City, and people that live there. We can imagine the book as a single consciousness, coursing through the city's denizens at random, seeing through one's eyes for a moment, a thought, a sentence or two, and then moving on, jumping too quick to get caught up in who they are individually, so as not to distract from the city. We can only begin to come to grips with New York City (or any city, or any place) on the human scale of experience. Humans intuitively understand by imagining entities to be human in some way, having motives, and a consciousness. The city takes on radically different qualities from each of these perspectives, often personified, uncooperative, even antagonistic. They see the city as monstrous and hungering, and at times unexpectedly friendly and even caring—but they don't let their guard down, who knows what it's playing at. Its motives are inscrutable, it is too vast, too complex to be understood. Its power is beyond our comprehension, this Colossus.

Living in New York City ourselves, we pass these people, or people like them, sometimes too close, bumping up against each other on the subway or in the street. We resent them or don't notice them or wonder or worry about them or feel attracted to them, but we don't know them, and we don't know what they feel and think, we don't know about their personal relationships with the Colossus. Whitehead draws us into the minds of those people we never connect to, and we find that they are in many ways like us, and in fact we are all connected: each person is a part of NYC, and each person has NYC within themselves. In this way the book is also about empathy, our creative ability to put ourselves in each others' positions, to suspend judgement and attempt to understand their perspectives, ultimately discovering that in so doing we have transformed our own.

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