Mahindra Persaud
May 5, 2014
Expository Writing UA1: Writing the Essay
Brian Schwartz

Finding Yourself

With an expansive memory and imagination, the mind grows and constructs images, snapshots, of the everyday life and stores them in the mind for later access. Sitting on the number one train in uptown New York, Colson Whitehead looks out of the subway window as the train rises out from the tunnel as it head towards the next stop. It is the early ages of the city, when “everything is filthy.” This is where he started creating his own private New York (City Limits). “Never listen to what people tell you about old New York,” he says since you were not there to see it for yourself you cannot include it in part of your own New York (City Limits). This is why the Met Life building will always be the Pan Am building to him. He does not call it that “out of affection” but because “that’s what it is” to him (City Limits). To anyone seeing the Pan Am building for the first time will call it the Met Life building because “That’s what it is” to them (City Limits).
“The city knows you better than any living person because it has seen you when you are alone” (City Limits). It knows the kind of person you are who you will become. The way you live your day-to-day life, permanently brazened onto your record by the “neon footprint” that is left by “every step” that you make (Broadway). Each person in the city “track [themselves] through city and years” as they walk their familiar paths every day (Broadway). They are the imprints that you left behind as a reminder to yourself as the kind of person that you are. If a person could see their “footprints,” they would “know [their] uncharted territories,” and be able to see where they once went, “never to return” (Broadway). “In the city you always end up where you began.”
This is the New York Whitehead remembers, not the new