TWO YEARS IN NEW YORK (Michael Mohr's Fictional NYC Covid Memoir)

Chapter 10 (PAID)

Photo by Ronny Rondon on Unsplash

Chapter 10

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus wrote: “The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.” I had great amounts of human need when it came to New York—a wild need for external literary and aesthetic validation—and Manhattan was silent in the face of this frailty. Ironically, it seemed that this silence was manifested in the form of intense, consistent noise. New York was a loud city. Everywhere you went the noise of Manhattan found you. The city stood stoic, unsmiling, arms crossed, looking into the middle-distance. It did not see you. It did not care.

In some ways this was exactly what had drawn me here: I wanted to experience the True American Melting Pot, the cultural diversity, the stoicism of an urban chaos of this magn…