Through the Children's Gate Read Online Free PDF Page A

necessity, different colors—some are gold and some are green and some merely gray—but in the end, the shapes we know are all the same: the arc of desire and disappointment, the rising half circle of hope, the descending crescent of aging, the scribble of the city or the oval of the park, or just the long, falling tunnel of life. Each of these shapes is to be found in any life lucky enough to have any shape at all. (The comic-sentimental essay is, in any case, a kind of antimemoir, a nonconfession confession, whose point is not to strip experience bare but to use experience for some other purpose: to draw a moral or construct an argument, make a case or just tell a joke.)
    And so some tiles on the map of the real city of New York, some of its streets and secrets and the games children and adults play within it, are my subject. Manners matter; children count out of all proportion to their size; and the poetic impulse, however small its objects, is usually saner than the polemical imperative, however passionate its certitudes. Comic writers should not have credos, perhaps, but if I had one, that would be the one I would have. These are stories about the manners, the children, and the objects of the professional classes in what was and remains the world's real capital, in a time of generalized panic and particularized pleasures, about the secular rituals of material but not unmindful people, a handful of manners pressed between the pages of a book. They are stories and images of a class in many ways privileged, but one whose privileges are always provisional, as rooted in this year's harvest of symbolic transactions as any farmer's are in this year's harvest of soybeans, and touched always by a certain pre-cariousness, the permanent precariouness of the professional classes in a plutocratic society.
    As for living within ambiguities and seeing two things at once while you do, well, children do it all the time. Olivia, at three, always cried when she entered a New York cab, “I want to see New York! I want to see New York!,” meaning that she wanted to look at the schematic map of Manhattan posted on the back of the front seat, and she 'd stare at it while the city sped along beside her. The picture and the city were, to her, about equally interesting. This book is like that map, like that moment: a picture of a place that remains intrinsically elsewhere, out the window. New York is always somewhere else, across the river or on the back of the front seat, someplace else, while the wind of the city just beyond our reach rushes in the windows. We keep coming home to New York to try and look for it again.
    Through it all that first feeling, on a night more than forty years ago, remains my major feeling: I am so pleased to be here that I can hardly believe I am. What New York represents, perfectly and consistently, in literature and life alike, is the idea of Hope. Hope for a new life, for something big to happen, hope for a better life or a bigger apartment. When I leave Paris, I think,
I was there.
When I leave New York, I stillthink:
Where was I?
I was there, of course, and I still couldn't grasp it all. I love Paris, but I
believe
in New York and in its trinity of values: plurality, verticality, possibility. These are stories of happiness in shadow: the shadow of a darkening time and the shadow of human mortality both. I feel the shadows, as we all do, and cringe maybe even more than most. But I try to remember that darkness is a subject, too, and need not always be too sad a one. Shadows are all we have to show us the shapes that light can make.

A Hazard of No Fortune
    H ome again, to begin once again at the beginning. Apartment-hunting is the permanent New York romance, and the broker and his couple the eternal triangle. A man and woman are looking for a place to live, and they call up a broker, and he shows them apartments that are for sale or rent, but the relationship between those three people is much more complicated