Through the Children's Gate

The author of Paris to the Moon describes the author's fall 2000 move from Paris back to New York with his family in a series of essays that profile the teachers, therapists, coaches, friends, adversaries, and others who make up their extended urban family and describe their new home, the impact of 9/11, real estate, and the meaning of life

Zusatztext "A wonder of a writer. . . . The very model of urbanity: frankly! unsentimentally! wisely enchanted." Los Angeles Times In the same way that Woody Allen and E.B. White slipped a permanent lens on New York so that no one will ever again be able to experience it without filtering it through their vision! Gopnik has captured and redefined our first and best city. Chicago Sun-Times A love song to Manhattan. . . . As in his Paris memoir! Gopnik explores the city through the wondrous! exhausting and often hilarious scrim of parenting. San Francisco Chronicle Brilliant . . . How can you not love Adam Gopnik? Seattle Post-Intelligencer Informationen zum Autor Adam Gopnik Klappentext Gopnik! bestselling author of "Paris to the Moon" and writer for "The New Yorker!" does for New York what he did for Paris in this collection about life! art! and family. Leseprobe Through the Children's Gate: Of a Home in New YorkIn the fall of 2000, just back from Paris, with the sounds of its streets still singing in my ears and the codes to its courtyards still lining my pockets, I went downtown and met a man who was making a perfect map of New York. He worked for the city, and from a set of aerial photographs and underground schematics he had turned every block, every highway, and every awningevery one in all five boroughs!into neatly marked and brightly colored geometric spaces laid out on countless squares. Buildings red, streets blue, open spaces white, the underground tunnels sketched in dotted lines . . . everything in New York was on the map: every ramp to the Major Deegan Expressway and every abandoned brownstone in the Bronx.The kicker was that the maniacally perfect map was unfinished and even unfinishable, because the city it described was too dynamic, changing every day in ways that superceded each morning's finished drawing. Each time everything had been put in placethe subway tunnels aligned with the streets, the Con Ed crawl spaces with the subway tunnels, all else with the buildings abovesomeone or other would come back with the discouraging news that something had altered, invariably a lot. So every time he was nearly done, he had to start all over.I keep a small section of that map in my office as a reminder of several New York truths. The first is that an actual map of New York recalls our inner map of the city. We can't make any kind of life in New York without composing a private map of it in our mindsand these inner maps are always detailed, always divided into local squares, and always unfinished. The private map turns out to be as provisional as the public onenot one on which our walks and lessons trace grooves deepening over the years, but one on which no step, no thing seems to leave a trace. The map of the city we carried just five years ago hardly corresponds to the city we know today, while the New Yorks we knew before that are buried completely. The first New York I knew well, Soho's art world of twenty years ago, is no less vanished now than Carthage; the New York where my wife and I first set up housekeeping, the old Yorkville of German restaurants and sallow Eastern European families, is still more submerged, Atlantis; and the New York of our older friendswhere the light came in from the river and people wore hats and on hot nights slept in Central Parkis not just lost but by now essentially fictional, like Nu. New York is a city of accommodations and of many maps. We constantly redraw them, whether we realize it or not, and are grateful if a single island we knew on the last survey is still to be found above water.I knew this, or sensed some bit of it, the first time I ever saw the city. This was in 1959, when my parents, art-loving Penn students, brought my sister and me all the way from Philadelphia to see the new Guggenheim Museum on its opening day. My family ...

"A wonder of a writer. . . . The very model of urbanity: frankly, unsentimentally, wisely enchanted." —Los Angeles Times“In the same way that Woody Allen and E.B. White slipped a permanent lens on New York so that no one will ever again be able to experience it without filtering it through their vision, Gopnik has captured and redefined our first and best city.” —Chicago Sun-Times “A love song to Manhattan. . . . As in his Paris memoir, Gopnik explores the city through the wondrous, exhausting and often hilarious scrim of parenting.” —San Francisco Chronicle“Brilliant . . .  How can you not love Adam Gopnik?” —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Autorentext

Adam Gopnik

Klappentext

Gopnik, bestselling author of "Paris to the Moon" and writer for "The New Yorker," does for New York what he did for Paris in this collection about life, art, and family.

Zusammenfassung
Not long after Adam Gopnik returned to New York at the end of 2000 with his wife and two small children, they witnessed one of the great and tragic events of the city’s history. In his sketches and glimpses of people and places, Gopnik builds a portrait of our altered New York: the changes in manners, the way children are raised, our plans for and accounts of ourselves, and how life moves forward after tragedy. Rich with Gopnik’s signature charm, wit, and joie de vivre, here is the most under-examined corner of the romance of New York: our struggle to turn the glamorous metropolis that seduces us into the home we cannot imagine leaving.

Leseprobe
Through the Children’s Gate: Of a Home in New YorkIn the fall of 2000, just back from Paris, with the sounds of its streets still singing in my ears and the codes to its courtyards still lining my pockets, I went downtown and met a man who was making a perfect map of New York. He worked for the city, and from a set of aerial photographs and underground schematics he had turned every block, every highway, and every awning—every one in all five boroughs!—into neatly marked and brightly colored geometric spaces laid out on countless squares. Buildings red, streets blue, open spaces white, the underground tunnels sketched in dotted lines . . . everything in New York was on the map: every ramp to the Major Deegan Expressway and every abandoned brownstone in the Bronx.The kicker was that the maniacally perfect map was unfinished and even unfinishable, because the city it described was too “dynamic,” changing every day in ways that superceded each morning’s finished drawing. Each time everything had been put in place—the subway tunnels aligned with the streets, the Con Ed crawl spaces with the subway tunnels, all else with the buildings above—someone or other would come back with the discouraging news that something had altered, invariably a lot. So every time he was nearly done, he had to start all over.I keep a small section of that map in my office as a reminder of several New York truths. The first is that an actual map of New York recalls our inner map of the city. We can’t make any kind of life in New York without composing a private map of it in our minds—and these inner maps are always detailed, always divided into local squares, and always unfinished. The private map turns out to be as provisional as the public one—not one on which our walks and lessons trace grooves deepening over the years, but one on which no step, no thing seems to leave a trace. The map of the city we carried just five years ago hardly corresponds to the city we know today, while the New Yorks we knew before that are buried completely. The first Ne…