"Dear God," she prayed, "let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me hungry...have too much to eat. Let me ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere--be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one blessed piece of living is ever lost."
- Francie Nolan in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
This sounds like a prayer I would pray. Or at least a prayer I would have prayed before coming to New York City. Living in the suburbs of Chicago, I was terrified of languishing into a life of passivity, complacency, boredom and insensitivity. Since I’ve been in NYC, I can feel my fear shifting. Now, I am more afraid of drifting to an extreme. Here, the rich are so rich it is repulsive. The poor are so downtrodden they reduce themselves into a huddle of dirty blankets.
I think recently it has been my distant interactions with the homeless that have most affected me. Seeing them coiled up on the subway, often smelling so strongly like manure that other passengers switch cars as soon as they step on. In fact, my theory is that they make themselves smell so horrid so that they can have an entire car to themselves in order to remain isolated in their shame. These unfortunate souls do not acknowledge the living occurring them and they make every effort to not be acknowledged by it. Their pain has reduced to them to the point that they don’t even have faces—the distinguishing mark of a human—because they hide completely within blankets and hooded sweatshirts.
Francie Nolan thinks if she can only live her life in the margin of extremes then she will at least know she is alive; then she will be carpeing the diem. But I think she is mistaken. It is in the extremes that you forget to live.
The rich drift through life on the gentle waves of cash that put them into a slumber or they obsess with money to the point that they forget there is more to life than a bank account. The homeless daze out in hopes of disappearing. And, contrary to Francie's eagerness to dream, even dreaming all the time can also be a curse—just ask a war veteran who can’t shake his nightmares. I think all three of these (even the rich if you can get them to really be honest. See here for example.) would trade in their extreme existences so that they can live again.
Sometimes by being something, you can end up being nothing. Sometimes it is in the mundane that radical living happens most often.
