I've heard that various of the rulers of Rome, parading through the streets of that imperial city, would position a subordinate behind them to whisper in their ear, at intervals,
sic transit gloria mundi. As best I can tell (and who knows, I may not have it right), this is an ambiguous phrase. It can mean, in a general sense, that the glory of the world is transitory, and will pass away. Or, as a more immediate, concrete, and grandiose admonition, it can mean something like, Look up, O great Caesar, for that which we behold in passing is no less than the glory of all the world. To the wisest of those ancients, this double meaning, the moral reverberations of the duality, surely evoked all the responsibility, thrill and sadness of preeminence.
Well, whatever wisdom I have or haven't managed to accrue in my time, that ultimate ring of melancholy is what a recent trip to New York evoked for me. Why? Not because of historical parallels with ancient Rome, but because the New York we know, the New York of everyone from O. Henry to Leonard Bernstein, and J.P. Morgan to Joseph Mitchell, Duke Ellington, Arthur Miller, J.D. Salinger, Edward Hopper, and all those Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Astors, Roosevelts, etc., the New York of that great early- and mid-century
public flowering, has so conclusively passed into the all-consuming
private mundanity that is the present and likely future of the city.
Now. This is not a political commentary, but a civilizational lament. The terms 'public' and 'private' do not here denote the facile government-business dichotomy now rampant in our political discourse. Instead, what I'm trying to get at is the pervasive sense that the culture which gave us this greatest of art deco and neoclassical cities, has entered an utterly graceless state. This probably happened long ago, it can't really be news. But it took on a special poignancy when a friend who's deeply involved in the New York real estate market described the city as 'out of control.' Where once the pinnacle of industrial success would have led to the construction of a landmark that would become the inheritance of all Americans, the city's elite now bestir themselves only for the raising of steel and glass condo towers with $100 million penthouses. Where once the towering achievements of New York enterprise seemed integral to American life, they now have a kind of archival feel about them. They're still used, in some cases more than ever, at least statistically speaking, but they haunt us now, and shame us. We're not living up to them, and some part of us, however small, knows that the spiritual dynamism which produced the New York everyone is always falling in love with has given way to the mere technocratic mastery which is now ascendant. America can still
plan as brilliantly as ever, but it can no longer
imagine.
Or, put another way, New York may still be glorious, but the glory of the world will pass away.
