City at night

I wanted this walk never to end.  The silent and deserted alley was altogether murky and its ancient, pockmarked cobblestones glistened in the damp air, as though an ancient carrier had spilled the viscous contents of his amphora before disappearing underground in the ancient city.  Everyone had left Rome.  And the emptied city, which had seen too many and seen them all, now belonged to us alone and to the poet who had cast it, if only for one night, in his own image. 
 ...
As we ambled down an emptied labyrinth of sparely lit streets, I began to wonder what all this talk of San Clemente had to do with us -- how we move  through time, how time moves through us, how we change and keep changing and come back to the same.  One could even grow old and not learn a thing but this.

--André Aciman, Call Me By Your Name

My nephew Denny's friend Jay had just graduated from Columbia University, and we'd agreed to join him for dinner shortly after we arrived in New York.  Dinner turned out to be a loud and raucous feed on pizza and other Italian fare, joining a large number of Jay's classmates at a student hang-out on the Upper West Side.  The restaurant was so loud -- music and other patrons -- that no one could hear what anyone else was saying. 

No one cared.  It wasn't that kind of dinner.  Everyone had thoughts to express.  He did so freely and loudly, ignoring other thoughts being expressed by others at the same time.  The joy of talking far exceeded the desire to listen.

After dinner, we took the subway up to Columbia.  We wandered around the campus.  The term was over, but someone still had the key to his dorm.  We climbed to the very roof of the dorm on a precarious ladder-like staircase, toting ample supplies of beer.  The lights of all of Manhattan and the shores of the Hudson stretched out before us, dazzling my eyes.  We talked. We talked for hours, and now we listened as well as talked. I have no recollection of what we talked about, but it all seemed fascinating at the time.  After years of conversing with fellow attorneys, and downtrodden clients, a chat with freshly-graduated college students about even the weather would have stricken me as profoundly philosophical.

No one knew me.  No one knew Denny, for that matter, aside from Jay.  No one cared who we were -- I'm not sure they all knew each other.  We were just a bunch of over-educated individuals who happened to find ourselves in the same place at the same time.  At one point, a young woman sat next to me, and very tactfully and hesitantly suggested that I did seem slightly older than the rest of the group.  She wondered who I might be. 

By that time, I'd had consumed enough beer to have forgotten that I was not a 22-year-old myself, but I certainly wasn't offended by being reminded.  Everything and everyone seemed funny and relaxed and beautiful and magical.  (No, nothing other than beer.)   

Elio's statement in the Aciman novel, "I wanted this walk never to end," has brought back memories of that night in Manhattan -- a Manhattan with which I was then much less familiar than I am today.  "In a month or so from now, when I'd revisit Rome, being here tonight ... would seem totally unreal, as though it had happened to an entirely different me."  And so it's proved with New York

I've returned to Manhattan many times since.  I've walked through the Columbia campus.  I've even tried to locate the dormitory building on whose roof we perched.  Futile.  It's as though, as in the Broadway musical, I had discovered Brigadoon and enjoyed one day of magic, but found only heather-clad Scottish moors when I next returned.

I tottered unsteadily down the ladder-like stairway as dawn began breaking -- tipsy with alcohol but exultant.  Denny and I grabbed a burger at a McDonald's near our hotel -- even the grubbily pedestrian burger franchise-- occupied by a few survivors of the night before and a few early risers -- was touched in my eyes with the last fading shimmers of magic. 

The beer had been good, the company better, the view magnificent -- but best of all was a one-night return to my life as an undergraduate.  It occurred to me, as it had to a far younger Elio, "how we move  through time, how time moves through us, how we change and keep changing and come back to the same. 

"One could even grow old and not learn a thing but this."