I have been thinking about Baudelaire a lot, and Haussman’s Renovation of Paris. In 1857 Charles Baudelaire published Les Fleurs du Mal, overcome by nostalgia for his lost Paris and, beyond that, the cities and civilizations before it. “The Swan” remains my favorite poem. “Paris changes! But nothing in my sadness has moved!”

I have been thinking about Baudelaire, and that line in particular, because I feel uneasy in the realization that often I love the city not for what it is, but for what I knew it was, and what I feel it still should be.

Beyond all, the city now makes me nostalgic, the same way the Parisian streets did for Baudelaire. In Brooklyn, Anthony, Caitlin, and I passed a building covered in gorgeous, bright graffiti, and I could only think, for an instance, about the graffiti under the bridges in Athens, absurd images of swarms of bees and slogans of “freedom or death,” and I began to yearn for it. Despite its trouble, I had started to miss Greece. At the restaurant we ate at—some Southern-inspired, hipster locale—my dish reminded me of my mother’s cooking and beyond that her and her sisters, their town in Georgia. Going down by the water, reminded me of being young and having my grandfather take me to the beach. I didn’t miss the beach; I missed being young.

The city has stopped beings the ends for me. It has begun to exist only in relation to pervasive feelings of melancholy.

I don’t think about the city much anymore. I should say, I don’t have my own thoughts on the city because it tightens and rips and cuts and somehow destroys me. Passing the empty factories in Williamsburg is, actually, quite an overwhelming feeling, perhaps ineffably so. You feel the rage of such a waste of space (and the homeless you see everyday…), some vague sense of shame (for the greed of the city, for what it became), some wonder (that this factory, and ones like it, created this village and its skeleton is still standing), and sheer amazement (at the beauty of its silhouette against a cold skyline, somehow, inexplicably). Mostly, though, thinking too hard on it simply makes you sad.

Not only that, my impression of the city feels, perhaps as Foer would say, “once-removed” and my consideration of it is, in no small part, influenced by artists who have loved it before me. Across from the factories was a great patch of land. As O’Hara would say, “I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy…” I have become a flaneur. I walk the streets to clear my head, and think. I think about Ginsberg. I think, very clearly, his words: “my greater loves of Lower East Side.” Not because I have had any, but because he had and my thoughts and feelings are somehow only cemented in his words. My “absences and ecsasties” are his. And O’Hara’s, and Dylan’s, and Baldwin’s, and many more I can’t name. Even when I lead my own narrative, create my own observations, I feel as if I do not.

Do not misunderstand me. I am in awe of the city. Every morning when I wake up, and see the skyline, I find it unreal that any place could be as stark, and sharp, and sublime. Like Baudelaire, I want to continue to write of my city. But, like Baudelaire, I fear that I am searching for something that is lost. As bright and live and pulsing as the city can be, it still feels like an echo. Williamsburg felt like a book already written, put back on the shelf.