'A friend tells me: ''It's unhealthy to think of the past as real or true. The human being, he says, undergoes a complete transformation every seven years.'' Still, events remain, even if the Hotel has disappeared or the Hospital was nothing but a make- believe-Hospital everything has occurred for eternity in the imagination which unfolds its map of yesterday, its American Map, in the ill-defined vicinity of my today-reality. There are hundreds of important changes you need to know about today tells yesterday, but in the meantime today is already yesterday. New York has changed a lot. New York never changes. New York is a in perpetual state of a-changing. “Every day, road construction crews, State and Federal transportation authorities and local developers are working to make your maps and atlases out of date,'' American Map states. Only in American could you make such an apocalyptic statement.'
Hélène Cixous, ‘I Will Not Write This Book’, in Manhattan: Letters from Prehistory (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), pp.49-50. See also: (e)space & fiction ‘Is, then, Manhattan hard to point to? But if you were approaching La Guardia Airport on a night flight from Boston, then just as the plane banked for its approach, you could poke your finger against the window and, your interest focussed on the dense scattering of lights , say "There's Manhattan"; so could you point to Manhattan on a map. Are such instances not really instances of pointing to Manhattan? Are they hard to accomplish? . It feels hard to do (it is, then and there, impossible to do) when the concept of the thing pointed to is in doubt, or unpossessed, or repressed.’
Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p.74. |
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