This is, preternaturally, the adolescent city, a reflection of a hyperbolic mood, an icy fever dream. New York inspires expressions that are intense, willful, buoyant, brilliant, fragmentary, or melodramatic. Narrowness tends to trump variety. Variety flirts with chaos. Juxtaposition is more common than synthesis.
Perspectives are deep before they are wide.
The city encourages in art and literature a spirit that is at once intoxicated and oblivious, daringly vivid and maddening self-referential. If this striking combination of elements leads you to think that, yes, New York is the adolescent city, then this characterization surely suggests all kinds of value judgments, about youth, with its energy and its self-regard. Saul Bellow's Seize the Day , one of the classic New York stories, is about the calamitous downside of the adolescent city. The modern age analyzes the wavers. New York is all wavering, careening, confusing situations.