Let the Great World Spin

by Colum McCann

Another day, another dolor.

It might’ve been easy for me not to like Corrigan, my younger brother who sparked people alive, but there was something about him that made dislike difficult. His theme was happiness—what it is and what it might not have been, where he might find it and where it might have disappeared.

The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth—the filth, the war, the poverty—was that life could be capable of small beauties.

They’re all throbbing with fear. We all are.” He drank the tea without cleaning the lipstick off the rim. “Bits of it floating in the air,” he said. “It’s like dust. You walk about and don’t see it, don’t notice it, but it’s there and it’s all coming down, covering everything. You’re breathing it in. You touch it. You drink it. You eat it. But it’s so fine you don’t notice it. But you’re covered in it. It’s everywhere.

when you go around in circles, brother, the world is very big, but if you plow straight ahead it’s small enough.

That’s what sons do: write to their mothers about recall, tell themselves about the past until they come to realize that they are the past.

I had always hated Nixon, not just for obvious reasons, but it seemed to me that he had learned not only to destroy what was left behind, but also to poison what was to come.

It seemed to me that nothing much good had happened since the day Sirhan Sirhan had pulled the malevolent trigger. The idyll was over.

I wondered how many assholes it took to make a police department. They had been made braver and louder by the war. They had a swagger to them. Ten thousand men at the water cannons. Shoot the niggers. Club the radicals. Love it or leave it. Believe nothing unless you hear it from us.

New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief. He had a theory about it. It happened, and re-happened, because it was a city uninterested in history. Strange things occurred precisely because there was no necessary regard for the past. The city lived in a sort of everyday present. It had no need to believe in itself as a London, or an Athens, or even a signifier of the New World, like a Sydney, or a Los Angeles. No, the city couldn’t care less about where it stood. He had seen a T-shirt once that said: NEW YORK FUCKIN’ CITY. As if it were the only place that ever existed and the only one that ever would.

New York kept going forward precisely because it didn’t give a good goddamn about what it had left behind. It was like the city that Lot left, and it would dissolve if it ever began looking backward over its own shoulder. Two pillars of salt. Long Island and New Jersey.

The law was a place to protect the powerless, and also to circumscribe the most powerful.

That was the sort of everyday love I had to learn to contend with: if you grow up with it, it’s hard to think you’ll ever match it. I used to think it was difficult for children of folks who really loved each other, hard to get out from under that skin because sometimes it’s just so comfortable you don’t want to have to develop your own.

I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.

everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected. A

one of the beauties of New York is that you can be from anywhere and within moments of landing it is yours.