Thread by @ooana

Excerpt from:
My Lost City
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
1935

“What news from New York?”

“Stocks go up. A baby murdered a gangster.”

“Nothing more?”

“Nothing. Radios blare in the street.”

I once thought that there were no second acts in American lives, but there was certainly to be a second act to New York's boom days. We were somewhere in North Africa when we heard a dull distant crash which echoed to the further-est wastes of the desert.

“What was that?”

“Did you hear it?”

“It was nothing.”

“Do you think we ought to go home and see?”

“No—it was nothing.”

In the dark autumn of two years later we saw New York again. We passed through curiously polite customs agents, and then with bowed head and hat in hand I walked reverently through the echoing tomb. Among the ruins a few childish wraiths still played to keep up the pretence

that they were alive, betraying by their feverish voices and hectic cheeks the thinness of the masquerade. Cocktail parties, a last hollow survival from the days of carnival, echoed to the plaints of the wounded:

“Shoot me, for the love of God, someone shoot me!”, and the groans and wails of the dying: “Did you see that United States Steel is down three more points?”

My barber was back at work in his shop; again the head-waiters bowed people to their tables, if there were people to be bowed.

From the ruins rose the Empire State Building, lonely and inexplicable as the Sphinx and, just as it had been a tradition of mine to climb to the Plaza Roof to take leave of the beautiful city, extending as far as eyes could reach,

so now I went to the roof of the last and most magnificent of towers.

Then I understood—everything was explained: I had discovered the crowning error of the city, its Pandora's box. Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected,

that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed but that it had limits—from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless.

And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground. That was the rash gift of Alfred W. Smith to the citizens of New York.

Thus I take leave of my lost city. Seen from the ferry boat in the early morning, it no longer whispers of fantastic success and eternal youth. The whoopee mamas who prance before its empty parquets do not suggest to me the ineffable beauty of my dream girls of 1914.

And Bunny, swinging along confidently with his cane towards his cloister in a carnival, has gone over to Communism and frets about the wrongs of southern mill workers and western farmers whose voices, fifteen years ago, would not have penetrated his study walls.

All is lost save memory, yet sometimes I imagine myself reading, with curious interest, a “Daily News” issue of 1945:

MAN OF FIFTY RUNS AMUCK IN NEW YORK

Fitzgerald Feathered Many Love Nests Avers Cutie

Bumped Off By Two-timed Gunman

So perhaps I am destined to return some day and find in the city new experiences that so far I have merely read about. For the moment I can only cry out that I have lost my splendid mirage. Come back, come back, O glittering and white!