All good things...

The Upper West Side from the Riverside park piers

Time has come to say goodbye - to this city, our apartment, our old and new New Yorker and international friends, but also to a way of leading our daily life that we have cultivated and also cherished over these past four months. In many ways, it has been an enthralling way of life, an intense and exceptional one, which we are surely going to miss, but which may also be somewhat particular to the length and depth of a stay like ours.

At Columbia, I have had the unique chance to advance my thesis in an environment in which people partake in the questions, challenges and problems inherent to my research project. Achille and I have spent many hours brainstorming on his black board, brooding over such things as proving theorems about convexity from our axioms for segments, but also testing and re-enacting spatial scenarios to find out which four-place relations correspond to natural language uses of front, behind and left and right. When I was not in Achille's office or at one of my classes, I read, wrote and kept thinking in the Neo-Renaissance libraries of Columbia's main campus. Although I did miss my personal office in Lausanne, these spaces didn't fall short of inspiring awe.

The ever changing city with constructions on the High Line

New York City, for her part, is one of those places that can fascinate one more after a stay of four months than after a short first visit. It's an extreme place in many respects: extremely generous in its outstanding offer of cultural, personal and intellectual opportunities, extremely merciless when it comes to economic failure and success, and extremely diverse in terms of ethnicity, religion, social habits, and styles of life. It is also, somewhat less obviously perhaps, a spot of an extremely rich and instructive history. Learning more about it has allowed us to start seeing connections hitherto invisible to us. For instance, architectural language, inner-city migration and public infrastructure have all played together in creating today's social and economic outlines of the city - sometimes successfully and at others less fortunately (think for instance of the idea of public housing and the segregated sometimes ghetto-like isles it created all over the city). Maybe it is because things have always been changing at high speed in this city that so many neighbourhoods have witnessed diverse groups of inhabitants and various construction plans in their two or three hundred years young existence.

Another realisation that New York presses upon me more than any other place is the contingency of the fact to have been born at a particular place, as part of a particular socioeconomic group. Perhaps this impression is stronger here simply because I tend to interact mostly with peers when I'm in Switzerland, where I do not share twenty minutes of my daily routine with all those other city dwellers in Uptown Subway train N°1. Be this as it may, I do quite like this impression and it strengthens my idea of how much freedom we actually have to determine our existence once we abstract from expectations or role models particular to our usual environment.

Well. This to say that our stay in New York has been enjoyable and that we're fond of the idea of coming back in due course. For the time being, however, we are ready and happy to go home.

The Manhattan skyline from the northbound amtrak train