New York Was Amazing Until 5 Minutes Before You Got There
Went to see Midnight In Paris tonight. I don’t want to give away too much, but the gist is that many people spend their lives wishing for a past that never really existed. Or if it did, it wasn’t any more special than where they are now.
Paris has seen a lot of midnights, and they have probably looked pretty similar, whether you were stumbling out of a bar with Hemingway or hold up in a flat with Verlaine. Pick your favorite era, and you probably can imagine strolling the boulevards as they were meant to be, not the diluted version you see now.
People say this about other cities. New York is an obvious one. Also music scenes, art scenes, movies, toaster ovens, you name it. They don’t make ’em like they used to, huh?
Romantics especially tend to live in the past. When you look back, you can filter out all consequences, and be left with only possibilities. Seeing all the choices collapse into history is tough to watch. We tend to say “if only”, and then have another drink.
That’s not to say I wouldn’t have liked to get drunk with Dali, but if you can imagine a perfect world, isn’t it your responsibility to make what you see around you more like it? Your goal should be to make kids 50 years from now look back at your lifetime and say “I wish I could have lived then.”
Nothing Was Delivered 