LIBERTY ENLIGHTENING THE WORLD

Being in Boston makes you feel the force of the revolution. Well, “makes” may be too strong. Make that “invites.” You stand approximately where colonists fed up with the status quo stood when, for example, they dumped English tea into the harbor, and we know how much the English value their tea. The colonists knew. In Boston you feel, if you will, the force of the old world, but it’s not preserved for the ages. It’s like the sap that runs through a stalk determined to rise up.

Living in New York City makes you someone who loves the result of that revolution yet refuses to buy the product. The United States can do what it likes—it’ll perform a variety show, respond in ways too numerous to catalog—but New York thinks for itself, thank you very much. The United States exists in the abstract, whereas New York is the filth in your nostrils, the ringing noise or worse you can’t shake. Imagine New Jersey invading the West Side and the hand-fashioned implements or worse fighting it off.

Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky lays bare where we all are. Freedom leaves us, potentially, sinking slowly as we die of contagion caught indeterminately. Freedom leaves us too grief-stricken to remain alone, without a caretaker or master. Freedom leaves us invisible in the market. We leave freedom because we can, have the privilege to, have reached a place to explore for what it might yield about feeling. What does it mean to feel when you keep losing your senses.

Under an Ingmar Bergman sky, in matte black-and-white courtesy of cinematographer Sven Nykvist, we struggle to understand what just happened. It just happened, we say, but nothing just happens. One thing or being acts upon another, even if one appears to be or include the other. The actor has roots somewhere, a past to draw from, a story to realize. Decisions arise from opinions, which grow from seeds planted carefully or not. Grow up, we say, but growth takes place in any direction. Just keep looking.

J’adore Paris, mais c’est très chère. “Very expensive” is one price we pay for la liberté. We may pay, we should say, all prices being arbitrary, subject to the whims of sellers and what the market will bear. The market fights to be free right up until the guillotine becomes an option. At that juncture competition may yield to common sense or official intervention, there never being a point at which most capitalists will embrace their shared humanité. A stroll along the Seine costs nothing once you’re there.

Okay, but what about the world? You can’t travel city by city by culture by country by skyscape around the Earth, not in the confines of lines within paragraphs unless you intend an epic. The statue never leaves its pedestal, yet its torch lights up minds in far-off places. Interact with a Tibetan or Malian or Puerto Rican who sought a more fulfilling life and you will feel how much fullness you take for granted. Tonight someone is hoping to slip past the outsider detector and blend into the blessed, blissed-out crowd.