Jan Morris’s Manhattan: ‘A Sentimental Old Body at Heart’
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 06.25.07 | 11:40 AM ET
For half a century, legendary travel writer Jan Morris has visited New York City at least once a year. On the occassion of her “demi-centennial celebration,” Morris takes stock of the city she loves and finds Manhattan to be the place it has always been. It has a physical consistency, sure. “[W]ith the possible exception of Venice,” she writes in a short essay in the Financial Times, “Manhattan retains its physical character more tenaciously than any other great city of the western world.” The city’s cultural consistency, however, draws most of her attention.
“Now as always, Manhattan is in intermittent frenzy,” she writes. “I have known it in political frenzies, social frenzies, frenzies about soap operas, or baseball games, or sex scandals, or the state of the stock exchange, or the state of the Union. One transient excitement or another dominates conversations in this city as it dominates the news bulletins, and sometimes, of course, there are several excitements at the same time.”
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* Jan Morris on the Future of America
* World Hum’s Top Travel Book No. 24: “Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere” by Jan Morris
* ‘Paris Syndrome’: The New York City Strain?
* Japan’s “Freeters” Take Manhattan
Related on TravelChannel.com
* Destination Guide: New York City
* Video: New York: Must See
Photo of New York City skyline by gary.fotu via Flickr, (Creative Commons).