It was like the city that Lot left, and it would dissolve if it ever began looking backward over its own shoulder. New York kept going forward precisely because it didn’t give a good goddamn about what it had left behind. As if it were the only place that ever existed and the only one that ever would. He had seen a T-shirt once that said: NEW YORK FUCKIN’ CITY. Most of it takes place on one day in New York in August 1974 when Phillipe Petit (unnamed in the book) makes his tightrope walk across the World Trade Center towers, a walk that was called the artistic crime of the 20 th century. No, the city couldn’t care less about where it stood. 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. The city lived in a sort of everyday present. Strange things occurred precisely because there was no necessary regard for the past. It happened, and re-happened, because it was a city uninterested in history. 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. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. “One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days.
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