No Man’s Blog

One of the great pleasures in reading [a book, an essay, a column) is that cozy feeling one can have from reading a sentence or a paragraph that washes you with a strong sense of excitement and intimacy for the familiarity of the words, for the ability of  the author to articulate what you can only feel, as if these words where written for you, or even could have been written by you, if only you had the gift of writing.

I recently came across a wonderful essay by the writer EB White called Here is New York. Its a 56 pages love essay for New York.  Half a century ago he wrote that New York's survival
lay in its magnetism for ambition. It was a place "of strangers who
have pulled up stakes somewhere and come to town". There they are
offered "the gift of loneliness, the gift of privacy", but with a
generous hand and a "dose of luck". [it really is just a tiny example of his wonderful observations]

This essay kicked me in the stomach for almost every other sentence reminded me of my immense love to London.  58 years after EB Write wrote these words, take NY and replace it with London and it won’t feel strange at all. If I had the talent to write a critical essay about life as modern immigrant in this nasty lovable, hopeful place it would come up to something very similar to this essay.

Like him I believe that London magic lies in it’s historicism, in "the unexpungeable odour of the long past … the
vibrations of great times and tall deeds and queer people". 

Here’s the first page of Whites’ essay:

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