My NYC

Today, while reading on my train ride to work, I came across the most wonderful description of my walks home from the subway station in the evenings:
"The soft rush of taxis...and laughter, laughter hoarse as a crow's, incessant and loud, with the rumble of the subways underneath - and over all, the revolutions of light, the growings and recedings of light - light dividing like pearls - forming and reforming in glittering bars and circles and monstrous grotesque figures cut amazingly against the sky."
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

My coworkers often ask how I can stand the commute, why I don't just move to Connecticut, and why I think it's worth it to pay more to live in the polluted, loud, dirty city. The main reason, I think, is that in all of its awful imperfection, it is simultaneously comforting and reassuring. I come home after a day slaving away in the 'burbs, and I am immediately calmer as I listen to the city sounds. Manhattan has a uniquely romantic and hopeful quality to it. Naysayers will tell me to smell the gross city odors and pay closer attention to the crime and pestilence, but when I think of my NYC, I prefer a You've Got Mail sensibility, where daisies, the friendliest flowers, are just around the corner.