David Carr has a brief reflection in today's New York Times about the disappearance of an inspiring view from a less-than inspiring stretch of highway in New Jersey leading to the Lincoln Tunnel. It's a compelling piece of writing that reminds us of what is lost and what is gained as cities inevitably change.
"But something glorious, a view held in common by thousands of people who come to New York for the same reasons people always have, will now belong to a precious few. It’s not only a perfect metaphor for our times, but a cold fact that I stare at every day. I often mutter oaths, not at the men and women building it — everyone has to work at something — but at the people who decided that a view that is the visual equivalent of Wagnerian opera was something to be auctioned off.
"There’s still a brief interlude of New York cityscape I can see from my bus or car seat if I pay attention, but I don’t look that way so much anymore. When I look toward the city, I don’t see the glorious handiwork of human hands — I see what happens when those hands don’t know when to quit."
As Morrissey once said, "The past is a strange place."
And it can be a tricky, unreliable place, as well. Flint Expatriates tends to traffic in memory and nostalgia, which means you should probably bring a healthy dose of skepticism with you when you read it.
Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert points out in his book Stumbling on Happiness that we don't store intact memories of complete events. We rack up little snippets and piece them back together, as needed:"Remembering an experience feels a lot like opening a drawer and retrieving a story that was filed away on the day it was written, but...that feeling is one of our brain's most sophisticated illusions. Memory is not a dutiful scribe that keeps a complete transcript of our experiences, but a sophisticated editor that clips and saves key elements of an experience and then uses these elements to rewrite the story each time we ask to reread it."
And editors, as we all know, make mistakes. In his new memoir, The Night of the Gun, New York Times media writer David Carr details how the mistakes magnify when you add drugs and alcohol — two staples of Flint. Watch this video of Carr recounting one emblematic night and the slippery nature of memory.
