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What is the internet but collective memory? Anything that had been done before we could do better.
New York is possibly the only place in which most people have already lived, in some sense, in the public imagination, before they ever arrive.
The future is more Urban Outfitters, more Sephoras, more Chipotles. The future just wants more consumers.
The future is more newly arrived college grads and tourists in some fruitless search for authenticity. The future is more overpriced Pabsts at dive-bar simulacrums. Something something Rousseau something. Manhattan is sinking.
It lasted early into morning. Our bodies curled inward, away from each other, dry leaves at the end of summer.
Now I felt myself rescinding, emptying of all personality, emotion, and preferences, so that he would know as little of me as possible.
His room was clean and ascetic, bare walls dimly lit by a floor lamp. There was something serene about it, a temple emptied of all ceremonial accoutrements and cleared of incense smoke.
When other people are happy, I don’t have to worry about them. There is room for my happiness.
The past is a black hole, cut into the present day like a wound, and if you come too close, you can get sucked in. You have to keep moving.
The city was empowering. Even if a woman doesn’t have anything, the movies seemed to say, at least there is the city. The city was posited as the ultimate consolation.
Memories beget memories.
And because memories beget more memories, you always remember more than you think is even there.
His work ethic was like that of many other immigrants, eager to prove their usefulness to the country that had deigned to adopt them.
We hoped the damage was bad enough to cancel work the next morning but not so bad that we couldn’t go to brunch instead.
Leisure, the problem with the modern condition was the dearth of leisure.
You live your life idealistically. 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. You move in circumscribed circles. You move peripherally, on the margins of everything, pirating movies and eating dollar slices. I used to admire this about you, how fervently you clung to your beliefs—I called it integrity—but five years of watching you live this way has changed me. In this world, money
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