Newsletter from Jay Wilcox - April 2023: On NYC & the UN

Good morning/afternoon/evening!

For Hannah's birthday, the two of us spent a weekend in New York City and probably blew at least half our retirement savings at the Strand bookstore alone. We orient ourselves by bookstores, when traveling. Think about it: if you Google "bookstores near me," your phone will likely take you to the coolest, most user-friendly parts of any city, the corners made for diversion.

I joke about losing money, but Hannah and I don't keep receipts when traveling. Honestly, we don't take many pictures, either. Our trips go by fast, and too much documentation would mean averting our eyes from the moment. We walked more than a hundred miles over the weekend--and in a city laid out in a grid, you quickly learn intersections and turns, ways of shrinking the blocks to manageable size. In a sea of noise, I can zero in on Hannah's coat as she leads me through construction detours, tunnels of painted plywood. As long as I can still reach out and plunge my fingers comically into her dangling hood, I'm good.

On our last day, we visited the United Nations. Posters and plaques adorn the main floor, detailing the UN's ongoing struggle against war and famine and corruption and poverty and authoritarianism and sexual violence, disease and pollution, assassinations and genocides and sectarian conflict and climate change and misinformation. In that space, you can't avert your eyes. Every surface has something to read, more distilled futility than a body can digest at once.

The UN flag from the embassy in Baghdad hangs behind glass, tattered, patched in lifeless gray from the day the United States began bombing. I remember witnessing that history, as it happened--and the plaques detail so many lesser-known tragedies, triumphs subsumed within so much human horror. We keep doing this to ourselves. That's what makes the horror human, and a lot of the time, I feel this is a defining element of our species, this inability to just do better.

Visiting a place like the UN is supposed to be inspiring.

I was supposed to ooh and aah at all this concerted effort, this history of handshaking and grand gestures. Instead, once Hannah went off to find the restrooms, I felt smaller and more alone than I had in any other part of the city, wrapped around my heartbreak like a flag with no wind. I felt angry. I very quickly hated these well-meaning diplomats, these Honors students who insisted on climbing the deluge, and I wanted to look away, to shrink into my notebook and document the guilt that rode in with my anger. I wanted to hide, a hideous, violent primate. This place knew I was ugly.

And then Hannah came back. My companion pursued political science in order to study abroad. Fifty percent of her undergraduate career was spent internationally, experiences she's described as deepening her appreciation of home soil--not from any sense of nationalism or superiority but with the humility of one whose vision has been broadened.

Whatever world Hannah's living in is the world I want to live in. The world runs on cruelty, and I love my wife. Peace won't exist if you don't make it--and while I suppose that could be interpreted a number of ways, I mean it in the sense of making it to another day, choosing to engage and be a part rather than apart. I am grateful.

I hope you're well--and as always, you're welcome to write back.

Infinite Regards,

Jay