" it happened, and re-happened, because it was a city uninterested in history. strange things occurred precisely because there was no necessary regard for the past. the city lived in a sort of everyday present. it had no need to believe in itself as a london, or an athens, or even a signifier of the new world, like a sydney, or a los angeles. no, the city couldn’t care less about where it stood. he had seen a t-shirt once that said: new york fuckin’ city. as if it were the only place that ever existed and the only one that ever would. new york kept going forward precisely because it didn’t give a goddamn about what it had left behind.

— colum mccann, let the great world spin.