Synthetic Sublime, Pseudo Supreme, Gilded Greatness
When I started reading “Synthetic Sublime” I liked it, especially when Cynthia Ozick mentioned the joke about archeologists when they “at last uncover what [appear] to be… identical sacrificial cultic stand in homage to the city’s divinity-king”. As the reading progressed, I realized that my dislike for the piece did as well. It started when Ozick’s explanation to her prior joke was irrational because “the joke may apply to other modern societies but New York eludes such ironies”. New York is a beautiful and wondrous city but immortal it is not.
Ozick says “Second Avenue parking meters [are] the Ozymandias of the late twentieth century”, which is not true. What Ozymandias can best serve as a metaphor for is the city of New York itself. New York and it’s self-aggrandizing, arrogant nature which is perfectly parallel to the attitude held by Ozymandias himself, the King of all Kings, who’s statue, throne and might works are all but a mere pile of rubble.
Many times we have seen how arrogance led to the direct demise of a character. Oedipus, who thought he had the power to control his own future, Dr. Faustus, who thought that trading his soul for power would leave him immortal, and Dr. Frankenstein who too thought that his knowledge would be enough to rewrite the laws of nature. Not only was hubris a common trait among these characters but so was the fact that their hubris was a tragic flaw.
I may not have been to every continent, yet, but I have been to many cities and there are many beautiful cities scattered around the world, a different kind of beautiful than the streets of New York. The allusion to the greatness of the Roman Empire through categorizing New Yorkers as patricians and plebeians would be accurate so long as the reader realized that the Romans thought that their civilization was the greatest of it’s time and immortal from the changing course of nature. Ozick states that a “millennium’s worth of difference can be encompassed within six months”, an optimistic hyperbole. While the streets of New York have seen “millennium’s worth in change” plenty of other cities have seen millenniums worth in history. History, unlike change, cannot be synthesized, and that profound difference is what distinguished many other cities from New York; this fact essentially estranges New York from other cities making it a sort of synthetic sublime, a pseudo supreme having gilded greatness.
However my view began to change once again. E.B. White’s opinion about who lives in New York being described by a smell, eau de Jimmy Stewart, was both comedic and gripping. The reminiscent fragment about the “ferocious war game” is what makes the city of New York so beautiful. It’s the children of families from all around the world coming together and taking a dip into the melting-pot that is New York and transforming into a character so unique it can’t be found elsewhere.
