August 8, 2005
Sybille Bedford on New York's summer heat
An excerpt from The Sudden View: A Mexican Journey (1953; later republished as A Visit to Don Otavio), which begins at Grand Central Station before chronicling her journey to and through Mexico:
We emerged into the Hall of Mosaics [at Grand Central Station]. It was steaming like a Chinese laundry, the heat hit us on the head like a club. Summer in the large American cities is an evil thing. It is negative, relentless and dead. It is very hot. The heat radiated by concrete and steel girders is synthetic, involuntarily manmade, another unplanned by-product of the industrial revolution. This urban heat grows nothing; it does not warm, it only torments. It hardly seems to come from the sky. It has none of the charm and strength of the sun in a hot country. It is neither part of nature nor of life, and life is not adapted to it and nature recedes....
All day a grey lid presses upon the City of New York. At sunset there is no respite: night is an airless shaft and in the dark the temperature still rises. The heat is all enveloping, emanating invisibly from everywhere, from underfoot, from above, from the dull furnaces of saturated stone and metal. The hottest point is reached in the very kernel of the night: each separate inhabitant lies alone, for human contact is not to be endured, on a mattress enclosed in a black hole of Calcutta till dawn goes up like a soiled curtain on the unrefreshed in littered streets and rooms.
I will present irregular selections from my reading until I have time to return to writing for this site.