Senior Moments by Willard Spiegelman

Author:Willard Spiegelman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374712990
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Dallas, my residence for more than half my life, has had a kind of earned familiarity, the comfort that accompanies habit, but not unearned ease. Manhattan, my residence for a concluding chapter or two, will always generate the excitement of anonymity. It makes me feel I belong there precisely because I do not.

Walt Whitman, quintessential Manhattan walker, described his urban support and comfort as “the impalpable sustenance of me from all things, at all hours of the day.” He strikes the right, paradoxical note. Wandering through the city at all hours produces an impalpability that nevertheless is grounded in the body, in the life of everything and everyone around him that gives him physical and more than physical sustenance:

The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme, myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme,

The similitudes of the past and those of the future,

The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, on the walk in the street and the passage over the river,

The current rushing so swiftly and swimming with me far away,

The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them,

The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others.

(“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”)

Belonging and “disintegrated” simultaneously, Whitman ambles around, both in and out of his wandering game. He observes a scene, in the double sense of that verb: he watches it from without, and he performs a ritual, in this case the ritual of walking with and in the crowd. It is the ritual that all city dwellers, especially New Yorkers, understand and relish. From such scenes, rituals, and walks, Whitman amassed Leaves of Grass, the book that changed American literature. Walking gave Whitman the “sights and hearings” that he folded into his poetry. Reading that poetry, indeed reading any book, can sustain a walker like me when he then steps indoors, away from the crowd, and into the solitude of the library.

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