Julia Baird

I were your friend, and New York were a man, you would slap me and stage an intervention.

Australia is sunny, certain, prosperous and beautiful. Dolphins and turtles swim in the bay at the bottom of my street.

Stepping out of a cab in Manhattan is like licking your finger and sticking it in an electrical socket.

New York is a stoker of dreams, a disreputable, charming, buoyant rake.

I will always be torn. There is a word for the pain of homesickness in German, “Sehnsucht,” which is a certain longing, a pining that is both pleasurable and difficult.

This is what New York does, for all its flaws: It models reinvention, motion and constancy all at once. New York perseveres through everything.

And this is what lures so many of us back: the idea that we can simultaneously grow, transform and be our better selves.

As E.B. White wrote, “the city is buoyed by the hopes and ferments of so many awakening millions rising — this vigorous spear that presses heaven hard.”


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