"Here is New York" by E.B White

Aim:  1.How does E.B White encapsulate all the city's contradictory components in the essay "Here is New York"?
           2. How does he describe the civility and tolerance that  the city embodies?

Do Now: In your journal, describe components in the city that surprise you.

Motivational Activity:

1. Visit the website about the author. What other literary works did he write?

2. Where is Hell Gate Bridge? Turtle Bay?

Procedure:

New Vocabulary

Procedure:

1. Read the essay and underline the first sentence of each paragraph-the topic sentence. Explain what it means and  find at least one detail that is used in the paragraph to illustrate the topic sentence.
   • On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.
   • New York is the concentrate of art and commerce and sport and religion and entertainment and finance, bringing to a single compact arena the gladiator, the evangelist, the promoter, the actor, the trader and the merchant.
   • New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation; and better than most dense communities it succeeds in insulating the individual (if he wants it, and almost everybody wants or needs it) against all enormous and violent and wonderful events that are taking place every minute.
   • ...New York is peculiarly constructed to absorb almost anything that comes along... without inflicting the event on its inhabitants; so that every event is, in a sense, optional, and the inhabitant is in a happy position of being able to choose his spectacle and so conserve his souls.
   • The quality in New York that insulates its inhabitants from life may simply weaken them as individuals.
   • Although New York  often imparts a feeling of great forlorness or forsakeness, it seldom seems dead ort unresourceful; and you always feel that either by shifting your location ten blocks or by reducing your fortune by five dollars you can experience rejuvenation.
   • There are roughly three New Yorks...first, the New York of the man and woman who was born here...Second, there is the New York of the commuters...Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something (What characterize each kind of New Yorker?)
   • A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engine.
   • New York is nothing like Paris; nothing like London...It is by all odds the loftiest of cities.
   • Manhattan has been compelled to expand skyward because of the absence of any other direction in which to grow.
   • It is a miracle that New York works at all.
   • The subtlest change in New York is something people don't speak much about but is in everyone's mind.
   • The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.
   • All dwellers in cities must live with the stubborn fact of annihilation; New York is somewhat  more concentrated...
   • It used to be that the Statue Liberty was the sign post that proclaimed New York and translated it for all the world. Today Liberty share the role with death.
   • Te race-this race between the destroying planes and the struggling  Parliament of Man-it stick to our head. The city at last perfectly illustrates both the universal dilemma and the general solution...
   • ...there is an old willow tree that presides over an interior garden...In a way, it symbolizes the city: life under difficulties, growth agains odds, sap-rise in the midst of concrete, and th steady reaching for the sun...
2. Compare E. B. White's attitude toward the city with that of Gornick's. Both writers appreciate New York but their perspectives vary. What aspects do the two writers share ? In what ways are their feelings different?

HW 19# Compare E. B. White's attitude toward the city with that of Gornick's.