Gotham Diary:
Exactly As Photographed
7 November 2011
After brunch on Saturday, my friend Eric took me for a walk along the High Line, which I found to be exactly as photographed. (Also, on a bright November weekend afternoon, very crowded.) As I took the photograph of the London Terrace, above, I thought of the similar picture that Kathleen took on her first visit, two years ago. The only surprise was that it took no time at all to walk the twenty-odd blocks’ length that has been developed so far. This was partly because we didn’t have to stop at every corner, of course, but it was mostly because I was quite bottomlessly interested by the conversation that Eric and I were having.
When I got home, I changed clothes and got to work on all my regualar Saturday-afternoon chores; then, in the evening, we crossed town to have dinner with Fossil Darling, Ray Soleil, and an old friend from New Orleans whom I’m hoping to show, tomorrow, the newly-opened Gallery Formerly Known As The Islamic Wing. As a result of all this activity, which followed a week of irregular amounts of running around, I was fairly depleted yesterday morning, but it wasn’t that that kept us home all day. Kathleen, even more depleted, after an unusually demanding week,  than I, succumbed to an incommoding intestinal disorder. So we did not get to go downtown to take Will out for a walk to the park. That was a disappointment all round.
I was saving the High Line for a gloomy weekday in February, when the whole project was complete. “Now I’ve ruined it for you,” lamented Eric when I confessed this plan. “Not at all,” I replied, “It’s still not finished.”  I do want to see it in wet, wintry weather, when the ghost of what it used to be will be most apparent.
***
Over the weekend, I read an Op-Ed piece by Ross Douthat that elicited my unqualified assent. In “Our Reckless Meritocracy,” Douthat argues that, while hereditary aristocracies undermine themselves by acting stupidly, and totalitarian tyrants founder on foolish obsessions, meritocracies are at risk from inexperienced conceit.
Convinced that their own skills are equal to any task or challenge, meritocrats take risks than lower-wattage elites would never even contemplate, embark on more hubristic projects, and become infatuated with statistical models that hold out the promise of a perfectly rational and frictionless world.
I only wish that he’d gone a little further, and taken a poke at the metrics that advance our meritocrats — the pointless examinations that test all sorts of secondary skills (such as rote memory, docility, and thinking inside the box) that can be measured, while ignoring deliberative judgment altogether. The accent on testing produces an engineering cast of mind that effectively forestalls the discovery, without formal schooling, of the unexpected lines of thought that lead to wisdom.
***
It’s hard to believe, as Philip Lopate reminds us, that the High Line was built in the Thirties (that recently), but I can vouch for the accuracy of that statement that immediately follows, in his Design Observer essay, “Above Grade: On the High Line.” “A mere 30 years later it was deemed obsolete…” I wouldn’t have known why it was obsolete, but I could see that it was, from the passenger seat of my father’s car, as we crawled along the old elevated West Side Highway, commuting to and from our Wall Street jobs. As something of a railroad buff, I morosely collected examples of disused railway in the metropolitan area. Nothing, in the middle Sixties, seemed as doomed to irrelevance as trains. But then everything about that part of town was sadly derelict in those days, included the highway itself, which would be the elevated road that got demolished. I still can’t believe, quite, that people live there now. Which, of course, only a few do — compared to the crowds that will populate the new buildings certain to sprout alongside the new, prairial promenade.