It is a primitive darkness. It has always been here, after all the city lights have gone out, carrying its own time with the sun.

To live in a city is to live the life that it was built for, to adapt to its schedule and rhythms, to move within the transit layout made for you

There is mystery to how faith takes root and flourishes, how need transforms into belief.

To live in a city is to take part in and to propagate its impossible systems. To wake up. To go to work in the morning. It is also to take pleasure in those systems because, otherwise, who could repeat the same routines, year in, year out?

Let us return, then, as we do in times of grief, for the sake of pleasure but mostly for the need for relief, to art.

To live in a city is to take part in and to propagate its impossible systems. To wake up. To go to work in the morning. It is also to take pleasure in those systems because, otherwise, who could repeat the same routines, year in, year out?

New York fucking City, tedious and boring, its charms as illusory as its facade of authenticity. Its lines were too long. Everything was a status symbol and everything cost too much. There were so many on-trend consumers, standing in lines for blocks to experience a fad dessert, gimmicky art exhibits, a new retail concept store.

The first place you live alone, away from your family, he said, is the first place you become a person, the first place you become yourself.

You think it’s possible to opt out of the system. No regular income, no health insurance. You quit jobs on a dime. You think this is freedom but I still see the bare, painstakingly cheap way you live, the scrimping and saving, and that is not freedom either.