Mourning Solitude

The myth of the NYC Park.

Picture a serene scene. The most serene scene you have ever seen. One in a park of lovely green. (Forgive the Dr. Seuss treatment. I’ll stop.) Anyway, the grass is soft, the breeze light. Above you, the Brooklyn Bridge stands like some granite colossus, straddling the East River. It is majestic and powerful, enhancing the beauty and serenity of the surrounding park through it’s monumental architecture. A tugboat sounds a wistful horn in the distance. A gull soars overhead, starkly white against the bright blue of the sky. You are alone in a city of 8 million….lying cradled between the soft, cool grass and the warm midday sun.

Now, as you picture this wonderful scene, picture also a family of five. They stomp onto your soft delicate lawn, bickering, dropping litter, and dragging an assortment of towels, loud radios, kids, toys, lotions, hats, smells, and Teddy Grahams. They are a hurricane ravishing your oasis. They are a monster truck, tearing across your field of wildflowers, leaving a scar of mud and a cloud of diesel fumes. They march across the vast openness, and plop down, still bickering, right beside you. Your fortress of solitude is invaded, and you have been rendered powerless by the red sun of Krypton. (Okay, nerdy metaphor, but stay with me.)

Soon, a young couple arrives. They are ill dressed in spiky clothes and gothic makeup. They lie mere feet away from you, alternating between sharing a 7-11 slurpee and making out luridly. They smell funny. Their uncomfortably-tight yet trendy-in-some-circles clothing slips about to reveal rolls of fat and unsettling bulges. They grope and straddle each other openly in simulated love-making poses. You become sandwiched between them and the family of five.

Now imagine the entire park filling with more and more people. It’s overflowing. A sea of bodies covers every inch of grass, leaving each blade matted and struggling for life-giving light beneath some mass of flesh. The previously warm sun has been made sweltering by the combined body warmth of hundreds of glistening, sweaty, people. They jostle and grunt at each other like so many walruses sunning together on the rocky shore of some coastal inlet. The only oasis is a steaming concrete path that picks it’s way among the corpses, and meanders to a parking lot of weeds poking though cracks in the surface, broken bottles, and upturned garbage cans…a paradise of quiet compared to the populous garden of adipose tissue that it leaves behind. You run-walk to escape the clamor.

To be fair, at no point was my experience at the park today as idyllic as I described in the beginning of this post. It was gross from the get go. I thought I would go try to enjoy some nice weather, get some air, some sun, maybe relax a bit. No dice. The citizens of New York City will never cease to amaze me in their ability to be around one another and be seemingly oblivious to each other’s presence! It boggles my mind, because I am painfully aware of every person around me at all times. Meanwhile, they all seem to long for it! At a nearby ice cream parlor, New Yorkers happily queued patiently in a line that must have stretched 100 yards out the front door of the parlor. No ice cream is that good. I was repelled, but tot he contrary, New Yorkers seemed to instinctively join the line.

So, is solitude dead? Has it come to a point where we can only escape one another by locking ourselves away in our closet-like rooms? Even there, we jostle, and stomp, and make ourselves known to each other through a series of movements, noises, and actions…intentional or otherwise. The world becomes more and more populous, and I can’t help but think of the scenes in Soylent Green, with stairways littered by bodies, and streets so crowded that people need to be lifted into garbage trucks to clear space. Are these images to be prophetic?

The most frightening thing, to me, is that the crowds which I face daily here in New York City are nothing compared to some other places. India and Japan come to mind. The thought of a world rapidly filling with this kind of population density is anathema to nature. Will the State and National Parks of the US someday be the last remaining empty places? And will they be empty? No doubt vast throngs of tourists from overpopulated cities will surge into them upon their daily opening, leaving behind their tattered picnic blankets and single-serving meal cups. Worse, will the world sooner remove their protected status in favor of an unfettered population? Can mankind ever be saved from himself?

This post brought to you by Trojan Condoms.™