Through the Children's Gate

by Adam Gopnik

  And grant these gates their good effect on the city. So many people came to walk through them, even in the cold—pushing strollers and reaching up to touch, the children racing beneath and the old folks watching from the benches, as though expecting them to speak, to say something that mattered. The thing worked, no doubt about it. It seemed, in fact, like a regular annual festival that we had somehow forgotten to practice for a while—a festival dreamed up by the king of Central Park, which we had abandoned as we waited for him to come home.

  But a festival celebrating what, exactly? A secular ritual for what faith? I could easily imagine generations of betrothed West Siders who had been expected to parade beneath the orange; or that, for a century, no fourteen-year-old East Sider could confidently begin high school without a ramble through the curtains, but of course, none of this was so. The Gates were there as a secular ritual of ritualized secularism, an invented festival of the power of festive inventions, a celebration of themselves.

  Perhaps all liberal-secular celebrations are like that. Even this season, our great American Thanksgiving, we know now, does not come to us direct from the Pilgrims but is as invented as the Gates, dreamed up by an aesthetic entrepreneur, a magazine editor, as a festival of festivity. The liberal city constantly invents and forgets itself with its festivals—the marathon, the parades, the Gates—whose primary purpose is entirely frivolous, to break the dull round of the commercial year into the appearance of seasons and to give an occasion for another style of shopping. Sacred ritual is like stories in stained glass: We gaze and hope someday to understand. Secular ritual is a form of mistletoe; we hang it up and wait for something hot to happen underneath.

  * * *

  The children are gliding this year. Mobility and escape are not metaphors for kids; they are kids’ whole purpose in life, and the beautiful thing is that they believe escape exists. They are in training. They glide and scoot and bike and skate, and though they always come home, for now, they believe, effortlessly, that, like POWs in a World War II movie, they are getting ready for the big one, the Great Escape, when they will flee their comfortable quarters for the world beyond, taking with them (we hope) a fond memory of kindly jailors.

  The children pretended to fly over London a few years ago; now the hope of levitation has become a more practical daily activity, one of smooth movement in the opposite direction, away from home. We grown-ups, looking at them, see only the illusions of mobility and the possibility of harm: They will fall, break limbs, bruise knees, skin ankles. And so, New York parents, we wrap them up in swaddling of a kind: helmets that perch absurdly oversize on their heads, wrist pads and knee pads. Martha gasps as the children whiz by. But, though they accept the regalia with more or less good grace, they keep on in motion, getting ready for the day when the signal comes from resistance headquarters and they go for the fences.

  The current rage in the civilization of childhood in New York is still for those Heelys—sneakers with small wheels embedded in their soles. They enable a walking child suddenly to become a whizzing, gliding child, floating down the sidewalk, free. Luke found his pair at Modell's in September and began practicing on the sidewalk outside our building; it is harder to do than it looks, and it took him a while to get it right: the stutter-start beginning, the almost imperceptible push and one-footed glide that follow, the long whoosh home with the second foot dragging behind. The Heely has erased the Razor scooter, the child mover of five years ago (which can now be had, I've noticed, for thirty dollars, on sale at Modell's).

  The more specific appeal, I think, lies in the secretive nature of the wheels; a normal kid becomes a super-kid, rolling down Eighty-ninth Street like a motorcyclist. It is the revelation, as much as the glide, that stirs them. Luke went to visit the M's, where Emily was sitting shiva for her mother, and solemnly, beautifully glided down their long Riverside Drive hall to take her hand in sorrow.

  Olivia tags along, desperate to catch up with her brother and his mates and their fads, the latest thing. She is too small, so far, for Heelys, which do not come in her size. On the evening we had a bunch of boys over for chili and a World Series game, all the boys had their Heelys on, and they went outside to go for a roll (having been forbidden by a scuff- and neighbor-conscious mother to do it inside). Olivia disappeared into Luke's room while the boys were away. We looked in later. She had, we saw, tried to Scotch-tape, and then to glue, two AA batteries to the soles of her sneakers, to create a makeshift homemade wheel. Heartbreaking ingenuity of the smaller nation!

  We found Heelys in her size at last—but now Luke, of course, has moved on, indifferently, to the Next Cool Thing, which for the moment is not scooting, or flying, or gliding, but making things. He and the rest of the ten-year-old boys have discovered a new game. It is called Warhammer, and it involves neither screens nor even cards but actual miniature figures, some taken from The Lord of the Rings, which you painstakingly assemble and then even more painstakingly prime and paint, in order—eventually—to stage a battle. (“Warhammer” actually refers to an earlier game made by the same company, but is used as a generic term for the activity.)

  The game itself, which, like all such games, never actually seems to happen—any more than Yu-Gi-Oh! games happened, or any more than Major League Baseball Showdown led to major-league showdowns—is another of those bafflingly complicated sword-and-sorcery book games. You present a particular situation from Tolkien—the confrontation at the Mines of Moria, the Uruk-hai outside Helm's Deep—with enough variation (this troll here, that Rider of Rohan moved there) to create a different outcome from the one in the books. You find out what the new outcome ought to be by consulting the telephone-book-thick manuals that go with the game, which give the precise appropriate result for each confrontation: Two trolls confronting six Riders of Rohan, armed with swords, in the presence of a Wizard, produces one lost troll and three wounded riders, and so on. As with his other games, the narrative can be transformed into an infinite number of possibilities. This time the Tower may not fall….

  Of all the games he has obsessively played—or prepared to play—it is the most baffling. The preparation is endless: Constructing the miniatures takes forever and must be done in a ventilated room, which means, in a New York apartment, the kitchen with the window wide open to the November wind. The priming takes another day, and then the painting is meticulously detailed and painstaking, including—according to the honor code of ten-year-old boys—intensely realized modeling and shading, down to splashes of bright red blood around the troll's horrible mouth. Luke has decided to specialize in Evil Armies, on the reasonable grounds that goodness is already popular among his friends; an army of Orcs and trolls and Ringwraiths will give him an edge. “I'm interested in good,” he said seriously to the equally serious vendor at the hobby store, which promotes the games as relentlessly as Bloomingdale 's promotes perfumes, “but I thought I'd sort of concentrate on evil first.”

  The game combines, so far as I can see, the joys of being a Malaysian child laborer in a small-goods sweatshop with the excitement of double-entry bookkeeping. But it is their addiction, and they spend hours and hours on it. Our fears that they would be swallowed up by the screens are passing. Fashion, replacing last year's enthusiasm with this year's passion, neutralizes the seduction of the screens by promoting a new and opposed seduction, a much more effective force than parental disapproval. Hemlines go up because hemlines were down before, and the children escape the screens not because they have been liberated by their parents but because they have become fatigued with their enslavement.

  Luke and his friends now sit together in the kitchen soberly and silently making tiny figures out of glue and plastic and pain. The GameCube is, like, so over. At least the new game is a way into the pages. Motivated more by the game than even the movies, the boys are reading Tolkien—not just reading but scrutinizing, trying to find the mythological logic behind their mythologizing game. The screens have been defeated by the combined force of airplane
glue and literature.

  * * *

  It is amazing to contemplate the number of games Luke has embraced obsessively and discarded definitively in four short years. Each one, I see now, was a kind of cocoon against all that has been unfairly harsh and perplexing in his experience: chess tournaments and the Yankees right after 9/11, Yu-Gi-Oh! and football to get him through his godfather's illness and death. The wise men tell us that all the games we play—social games, language games, and sexual games—are a way of straight-arming harsh and perplexing experience, a way of building fences against the dreadful things that lie just outside the circle. We grown-ups play games in the face of fear and pain and death. Children do that, too, but with an added charge, an extra fillip, of abstraction, of doing the thing for the thing's sake. They play games in the face of grown-ups. Each poem we write may be a concrete way of organizing difficult experience, controlling it by giving it form; but each game children play is an abstract way of organizing experience for its own sake—see, you can control something.

  But then the force of fashion among small boys in New York has by now become much keener than it is among grown women, who will remain loyal to a favorite dress, an old look, or a trusted pair of shoes for longer than you might suppose. Women have, in their over-stressed, overbusy world, a kind of permanent truce to admire one another's Narcissos when they wear them, and the rest of the time to forgive one another their tracksuits and sneakers. Everyone knows which moment is which, and though the old jokes about cattiness and competitiveness are not entirely false, they no longer apply consistently. The mothers are like warriors; they are in the arena, or they are not.

  Luke and his friends, on the other hand, are as fashion- and trend-conscious as the people in The Way of the World, miniature Millamants and Mirabells. They wear only T-shirts and request new haircuts (“I want to have a sort of heavy-head look,” one boy in the crowd explained to his mother). They are, like all fashion-conscious people, at once intently conformist—the Charvet shirts and corduroy pants Martha brought back from Paris would be unthinkable for Luke now, even if they still fit—and at the same time insanely conscious of small details: this T-shirt, with this cryptic insignia of broken words and pattern, is cool; this one, with the Knicks insignia writ large upon it, is not.

  The reason they are the fashionable group is clear enough: They are the leisure class. They are occupied, of course, with school and homework, too much of both. But where their mothers have conceded polish to exhaustion—one sees beautiful women standing bleary-eyed outside Artists & Anglers in baseball caps and jogging pants—the boys still share modishness with one another. Students are always at once a leisure and a laboring class, and, like the boys at Oxford in Brideshead, our boys make up for their implicit subservience with dandyism. Kenneth Clark, in his beautiful account of his Edwardian childhood, writes of sitting soberly in his sailor suit while the childless ladies of fashion paraded themselves for his judgment. Now it is the children who are the masters of fashion, and the beautiful young matrons, their mothers, watch from nearby, in uniform, as they parade.

  They are leaving us, they are going away, they have a date across the water, like the Elves in Tolkien, whom Luke so carefully constructs, on the rare days when he invests in the Good. The children are Tolkien's Elves, a superior race of poets living among us mere mortals, on their way to the sea—from which they will return, of course, as more mere mortals. They are becoming artists, writers, themselves makers of stories and shapers of experience, no longer merely their parents’ subjects. Luke is writing his memoirs for school, and they are, I find to my delight, largely about the funny, mixed-up things his father has done: the time I thought I was ordering strawberries in Italy and got string beans instead, the time I forgot the word for the cheese I wanted and, finally recalling it, shouted out “Pecorino!” on the beach, as though it were a hunting cry. He has the soul of a writer, getting even in the guise of geniality.

  It will be a long time before our children are really gone, but we feel them getting ready, picking out disguises for the break, eyeing the laundry trucks. Our friends the M's, with one boy in college and another in tenth grade, are, miraculously, a couple again, going to movies and restaurants, dating. We hear the distant bells of possibility, too, and we try to make love in the afternoon. From our bed, we see the window washers suddenly rise up on their scaffolding with the timing of a Buster Keaton comedy, and Martha dives beneath the covers, and love is over. I watch the window washers, who try to look studiedly indifferent, high-mindedly virtuous. The scaffold takes them up to the higher, dirtier windows, and at last they are just boots.

  Maybe there is no city left, and these familar comedies of density—the window washers rising on their scaffolding to stare in the windows, the children whooshing down the sidewalks on their Heelys as the matrons shriek—are busy parts of a soon-to-be consigned past; we are in a Brueghel painting and not wise enough to know it yet. New York, which was lost, and then found, and then lost again, only to be found again, at least for now, may be as doomed as the dodo no matter what we do or whom we vote for.

  This is the thesis of several new books that I have been reading about the crisis of New York: For good or ill, the city—not just this one but all of them—as we have known it is a relic, and it will disintegrate as we watch. The Venetian metaphor is no metaphor. It's no accident that New York, as Paris did twenty years ago, is becoming a tourist spot (a tourist trap). People come to see the streets where bohemians once roamed. The city is dead, killed by the growth of the edge cities where suburban sprawl meets the semi-urban mall; by the final triumph of the car; by the need for schools and lawns and cheap shopping. Terrorism has done its part, too, making concentrations of people too dangerous. Flight from the city, which seemed, in the past twenty years, to have been stemmed by the property tycoon's child-bearing revolution, the late-arriving baby, is really (the argument goes) a force as inevitable as continental drift or evolution itself. All of life will soon be an exchange of pixels from seated positions in secure rooms.

  So cities are dying, though their death will not be, as we long thought, slow and violent. They are just being strangled. Cities will die sighing, not screaming, but they will die. They will be inherited not by feral gangs and rampaging hordes but by aging yuppies, professionals, like ourselves, who will linger to remember the Last Bohemia, Soho and the Village, after their children have fled to the edge or to the Sunbelt, as they age and their apartments drip value, like coffee filters, year after year. If the city remains intact at all, it will be as a relic, just as Venice is now, which people will visit for “culture” (rather than for the life of art) and for recreation (meaning sex in a hotel room, for people who can afford it). London is already nearly Londonland, Paris already a city of the rich and retired, and there is no more Venice at all, really, just a kind of simulacra of it, drained of inhabitants, if not of floodwater, and all in the past twenty-five years. Ten years ago New York seemed as much a city as Dickensian London was a city—a great grim lamp shining with greed and need, drawing people, like insects, to a doom they didn't quite mind. Now New York is sinking beneath our feet.

  I have an interest in this, as someone whose entire wealth, or, rather, whose entire weight of optimistic debt, is sunk into the city, and as one who has learned that he will never be able to drive (or sail or swim or do anything save walk), and so I do not want it to be true. But when I walk the streets, I don't feel something coming to an end, as one did in the early seventies, when the previous New York of immigrant manufacture was dying and no new thing was yet clearly being born. What I feel instead is a thing coming into being through common need, which is all a city is. The immigrant stories of this generation will be epic when the immigrant children come to write them: Already the children's babysitters have included a Korean girl, now at law school, whose family's rise from twenty-four-hour groceries will be every bit as astounding as my own family's rise from Ellis Island, which passed by way of groceries, too.


  A sense of still-here pervades even the bits that are long-standing. To stand in Fairway on a Saturday afternoon, where the olive-oil tasting goes on alongside the search for monster boxes of All, or to walk through the meatpacking district, now decarcassed, where the twentysomethings with their BlackBerrys send each other—what, exactly, I don't know—billets-doux of the newer kind, is to see a world of engagement, of brief exchanges, of bumping into, something that certainly feels necessary and urgent, not indulgent and nostalgic. Every time I take a taxi home from La Guardia, I don't feel anything like nostalgia (as I must admit I do when the cab from the airport turns toward Paris) but rather wonder, relief—relief that it's still there, that I will be there soon, delivered from the netherworld of other places, my flat feet solidly on the flat ground.

  We no longer take homeland security alerts as seriously as we once did, as perhaps we still should. The mayor went on television to say, “They're coming,” and New Yorkers said, “So what if they do?” We have not outgrown fear but been worn out by it. What we practice is not resignation, really, but a kind of self-deluding guessing at the averages—what baseball managers call playing the percentages. If it happens, it is, given the size of the city, unlikely to happen to me, to us. On the way to work, I took the weird, newly renamed W train, thinking in some desperate deal-making-with-the-demons part of my superstitious soul that Osama bin Laden has certainly never heard of the W and that, out-of-towner that he is, he will think only of the 6, and the Broadway local, like Sauron looking past the Shire.