I walked along the path that borders the sheep meadow in Central Park. As I trod the wet dirt, my shoes giving in to the loamy soil, I felt European. I was in a northern place, that could have easily been France or Germany, at this same time of year. The sky shadowed in clouds, the sycamores naked, the subzero temperature, giveaways that this land is harsh during the winter. I walked south until I realized that the path was one of those annoying ones that curled back east, and I needed to go west, so I took a quick right and lost a few paces on the German couple I had originally overtaken, who now were ahead of me.
I thought of the birds that survive on grubs and leaves. I wondered how they do. I felt the incipient spring just weeks away, followed by the budding leaves and the onset of heat and summer’s glaze. But now, as I looked at my boots crushing into the mud, I remembered that this turn of seasons has been going on for hundreds of years. I stopped there. Because to define the turn of seasons in this place without human contact, since the Algonquins didn’t live on Manhattan Isle due to religious reasons, would have been superfluous. Not because the thought of life without humans is not important to meditation and transcendence, but rather, because I was feeling in a very Romantic mood after having seen Canova‘s bas-reliefs that were supposed to decorate his mausoleum. Imagining human life in Northern Europe or North America, pre-Goethe would have been to imagine barbarianism, the spartan freeze of Protestanism’s arrival, or the black-wearing Dutch colonials who treated Central Park as farmland. I considered Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel as a delicate rendering of the coming spring and the end of the frost. I recalled the rains of St. Patrick’s Day and the fifty-degree moments that led us to curl up in bed after having shrugged off our wet clothes.
I was Werther in that moment. I was symbolic of youth, in the prime of adulthood, stepping over a wet trail on the way to a warmer, drier one, which would leave me more comfortable, relaxed, and successful. A life of less suffering is where it was leading me, and as much as I looked forward to it, I also repudiated it for the coming ease and tranquility, the general lack of suffering it would provide.
I wanted to suffer through Europe, to struggle as I did in Vienna to afford a wurst and pretzel, stuffed olives at the market and later the single beer that was mine before I decided to sleep in the train station. I wanted to see more gray skies and cold weather as I crossed the land, walking for myself because I felt I had to. I wanted to keep wearing winter jackets, to feel my core cold, to stay here in the transitional period when spring is on the horizon, just beyond the hill, yet far enough away to recognize the coming exertion it will take to get there.
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