23
" Such were the things I discovered in the weeks before leaving for the city. In advance of all of my trips I would dip into the culture by reading novels and poetry, watching films and television programs, and browsing fashion, travel, and design blogs. Doing this, relishing how enjoyable an upcoming experience might be, isn’t just edifying—it can boost our spirits long before we even leave for the airport. “Anticipation is a free form of happiness,” Elizabeth Dunn found in her research on well-being, “the one that’s least vulnerable to things going wrong. "
― Stephanie Rosenbloom , Alone Time: Four Seasons, Four Cities, and the Pleasures of Solitude
25
" Alone, we can listen, not to those who tell us we must see the famous this or that, or to the voice in our head that says a place must be as it seems in a film or on a website - but to what's really there. We can hear the muezzin, the bookseller, the rug hawker, the echoes of an ancient cistern and the mysteries buried within. Alone, we don't have to speak. We can feel the vibration of a city as it is in that moment in time and will never be again: the sound of the crowd, the waves crashing into the harbor, the cries of seagulls swooping over the Bosporus.
Here, and then gone. "
― Stephanie Rosenbloom , Alone Time: Four Seasons, Four Cities, and the Pleasures of Solitude
27
" When I go to a museum with friends, I remember the outing. When I go alone, I remember the art. Certainly, visiting a museum as a social occasion is a wonderful way to spend time with people we love. But there are also upsides to going by oneself, as the research suggests. A person’s response to a work of art may be an emotional, private experience. There are paintings and sculptures you want to fall into, wrestle with, or simply sit across from in silence. "
― Stephanie Rosenbloom , Alone Time: Four Seasons, Four Cities, and the Pleasures of Solitude
28
" Manhattan is dangerous, though not for the old reasons: muggings, pickpocketing, prostitution. The danger is that the longer you stay - the longer you're bathed in the glow of blinking screens in Times Square, swept along by swarms of commuters, pursued by a mangy imitation of Mickey Mouse who wants a few dollars to pose for photos - the less you're able to feel the wonder. The lights dim. The little battles with subway doors, your radiator, the rat that walks into you in Union Square as if you were the rodent, wear you down. You grow tired, switch off certain receptors.
For years I paid little attention of my city, and in time, it disappeared. I put on sunglasses, put in earbuds, and blindly walked the streets that Billie Holiday and Roy Lichtenstein had walked. Every parade was an inconvenience, as was every stranger, talking too loudly, walking too slowly. I was living in one of the most visited cities in America, working in a skyscraper that people from all over the world stopped to photograph, and skipping town whenever possible. "
― Stephanie Rosenbloom , Alone Time: Four Seasons, Four Cities, and the Pleasures of Solitude
29
" After my return to Paris, one thing seemed obvious: To see Manhattan again, to feel as good about New York as Liza Minnelli sounded singing about it at Giants Stadium in 1986 (Google it), I had to start treating it as if it were a foreign city; to bring a reporter's eye and habits, care, and attention to daily life.
But as that was the sort of vague self-directive easily ignored, I gave myself a specific assignment: Once a week, during routine errands, I would try something new or go someplace I hadn't been in a long while. It could be as quick as a walk past the supposedly haunted brownstone at 14 West 10th Street, where former resident Mark Twain is said to be among the ghosts. It could a stroll on the High Line, the elevated park with birch trees and long grasses growing where freight trains used to roll. Or it could be a snowy evening visit to the New York Public Library's Beaux-Arts flagship on Fifth Avenue, where Pamuk wrote the first sentence of The Museum of Innocence. There I wandered past white marble walls and candelabras, under chandeliers and ornate ceiling murals, through the room with more than ten thousand maps of my city, eventually taking a seat at a communal wood table to read a translation of Petrarch's Life of Solitude, to rare to be lent out.
Tourist Tuesdays I called these outings, to no one but myself. "
― Stephanie Rosenbloom , Alone Time: Four Seasons, Four Cities, and the Pleasures of Solitude
30
" I began reading about urban planning, a subject that had long interested me. To fall in love with your city again, try seeing it through the eyes of an urbanist. You become a benevolent narrator, observing how your characters negotiate daily routines as they hurry about their lives. You come to understand how a new building affects a nearby park, how a few chairs placed under a tree can transform a street. Even things that are irritating - the biker flying down the sidewalk, the plaza with no place to sit - become a puzzle to solve. What design might be better? What would bring everyone together? What pulls them apart? The spirit of investigation began to return, and I was back on the sidewalk, looking for clues. "
― Stephanie Rosenbloom , Alone Time: Four Seasons, Four Cities, and the Pleasures of Solitude
31
" After taking my city for granted, complaining about its pace, its smells, its noise, its people, its anonymous buildings blocking the sky, it's romancing me. I pass the dog walkers, the bridges, the kayakers and houseboats on the Hudson, the wabi-sabi streets and stoops, and am thankful that in less than twenty-three square miles the city provides both profound solitude - and also the very best people with whom to break it. "
― Stephanie Rosenbloom , Alone Time: Four Seasons, Four Cities, and the Pleasures of Solitude
32
" Each day I perform complex choreography around people, dogs, garbage bags, cyclists going the wrong way, traffic signs with arrows that say ONLY, creaking as they swing in the wind. Sometimes I walk for blocks, even miles, without paying much attention. But then my gait slows. Something tugs at my arm and whispers, Look! Look. There are limestone angels about the doors of the Parish of the Guardian Angel. There's a Banksy painted on Zabar's. There are toy cardinals tied like red ribbons to tree branches on Bank Street.
And just like that, Manhattan has me again. "
― Stephanie Rosenbloom , Alone Time: Four Seasons, Four Cities, and the Pleasures of Solitude