I just spoke to my daughter in Manhattan who informed me that the snow had been belting down for several hours. When she left my apartment and walked to the Whole Foods at Union Square there was a huge queue outside, as the place was so packed they were not letting anyone else in, and she would have to wait outside in the snow for a considerable amount of time until the current wave of panicked shoppers thinned out a bit (she smartly decided to decamp back to the flat) Now this is supposed to be a storm of historic proportions. But it will also be over by late tomorrow night (according to weather). And New York is not exactly Labrador, where a major blizzard might lead you snowed in and without power for days (when the big blizzard of 2013 hit, there was three feet of snow banked up against my front door in Maine - which meant I couldn’t open it and had to get a neighbor with a snow blower to get me out of there). Anyway, it’s fascinating how the prospect of climatic craziness brings out the survivalist instinct in even New Yorkers (who, like myself, are used to getting everything delivered at home - though the Mayor has banned all that this evening). The power grid might get a little strained tonight, but stocking up on candles and batteries and water as if the city is going to plunge into arctic darkness... oh, please. We have, of recent, become obsessed with disaster scenarios. In fact I would posit that the dawn of the atomic age - the notion of mutually assured destruction - tapped into an apocalyptic corner of the human psyche. Just as the instantaneousness of communication and information today - you can watch a webcam of the blizzard right now - means that we are hooked on calamity and extremity as a spectator sport. And the twenty-four hour news cycle just fuels this King of All Blizzards hype. It’s just a big snowstorm, after all. And my one regret is that I am elsewhere this week (Montreal) and will miss it all. New York is even more romantic sous la neige.
Posted on: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 00:33:27 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015