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Tuesday, September 07, 2004
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Life imitates a bad novel.
A sixth NYU student has killed herself by jumping out of a building. She jumped out of a campus building, in fact, and landed in the midst of students settling in to dorms and classrooms for the new academic season. Inevitably the number and the method of these deaths (and this latest one occurring in early September) evoke 9/11. In the heart of New York brightness falls from the air. What does it mean? UD has already (UD, 3/27/04) said that she doesn't know. But a certain sardonic message seems to take clearer shape with each of these public leaps. The students jump from the library's interior balcony, landing on the lobby. They jump from just-built post-modern high-rise classrooms onto the streets of Greenwich Village. On glorious afternoons in a gorgeous city, the city's favored sons and daughters are arresting the momentum whose energy drew them to NYU in the first place. Is it because it is all too much? Because at some point, for some people, the passionate intensity of the city tips over into a kind of madness? A kind of suffering? |