Apology for Breathing

A.J. Liebling’s “Apology for Breathing,” gave me a deeper understanding of what it is like to be a native New Yorker—one who is polite and knows when to interrupt in conversations.Not the New Yorker who is from a small town, used to having his or her thoughts seem grand and wise. But instead the true New Yorker accommodates and bends to the multitude of cultures and lifestyles that make the city whole.

The author does a wonderful job at uncovering these truths in a way that sounds like a little self-realization coupled with vivid portraits of the city’s inhabitants. It could have very well sounded like an anthropological assessment or an analysis. But it did not.

Since this piece reads like an anecdote,  of course the city’s representative inhabitants will change from time to time. I found it difficult to identify most of these people on Liebling’s list below. But I do get the undercurrent of his message : the city can sometimes look more like a mixed salad than a melting pot.

“I like to think of all the city microcosms so nicely synchronized though unaware of one another : the worlds of weight lifters, yodelers, tugboat captains, and sideshow barkers, of the book ditchers, sparring partners, song pluggers, sporting girls and religious painters, of the dealers in rhesus monkeys and the bishops of churches they established themselves…”

A sentence that I appreciated much from Liebling was his point later in the passage pointing out the city’s irony—its residents live so close, yet know nothing about each other.

“There are New Yorkers so completely submerged in one environment, like the Garment Centre or Jack and Charlie’s, that they live and die oblivious of the other worlds around them.”

This I believe was once a universal statement about the city, but now a notion which I think is under revision now with the fever of “The Tale of Two Cities,” the mantra of the city’s lead mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio.