I have to be frank in saying that the opening line of this book didn’t stand out to me as anything particularly spectacular. I don’t mean that it’s boring or that it doesn’t make me want to continue reading. I just mean that it’s a well-written opening line, and it does the job of “drawing the reader in and making them want to know why and how New York does this.” It’s an interesting statement and it accomplished its goal, but it’s not really what I remembered most from my first reading of the book.
I do agree with it, however.
When one thinks of the concept of a gift, positive things come to mind: birthdays, holidays, congratulations on events like graduation. But a gift is simply something that one person gives to another; it isn’t inherently a good thing. After all, the Trojan Horse was supposed to be a gift, and that ended with the destruction of Troy.
So I think that White isn’t wrong to call loneliness a gift–the city bestows it on its residents whether they want it or not. Seeing all the lights of Manhattan shining unwaveringly in the distance feels a lot like looking at a sky of stars–you can’t even comprehend how many there are, how many worlds or people (who are worlds unto themselves) they represent. You look out on them and realize you can spend your whole life here and never know more than a single drop in an ocean’s worth of the population at any given time–and like the contents of a tidepool, the people who make up the population keep changing. Maybe it’s a good thing the light of the city blocks out the stars–feeling twice as small would be overwhelming.
Privacy, however, is definitely a gift one might want from New York. While I was thinking about this part of the line, I remembered a line from The Great Gatsby, spoken by the character Jordan Baker: “And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.” It’s easy to get lost in New York, to blend in with the crowd. There’s so many houses, town houses, and apartment buildings (both private and public) that the odds of easily finding someone’s residence by chance or trial-and-error are slim to none. It’s impossible to ask someone whether they know another particular person and hope for a positive answer. Everyone has their own life to worry about, never mind the life of one person in eight million. For the same reasons one might feel lonely, one might feel comforted knowing that they won’t be found by any old person any time soon if they don’t want to be.

White incorporates his lists into the prose, letting them flow naturally with the writing rather than setting them aside in bulleted format. They don’t obstruct the narration, and it’s only on looking more closely that one realizes that they’re lists. White uses these lists when he’s trying to make a point about a certain multi-layered aspect of New York–on page 20, for example, he describes events and people in the city’s history in terms of how far from his hotel they occurred or were. It gives the effect of showing how at any given point, even somewhere like a hotel, one is never too far from some point of interest or some part of the city that was touched by history. All the lists serve this or a similar purpose; all the lists demonstrate just a few of innumerable aspects or possibilities for any given subject.