...“Living With Strangers” Many people think that urban life in big cities means a happy life, with no worries and just pure happiness. But what is happiness? And what makes us think that urban life is pure happiness? In the essay “Living With Strangers” by Siri Hustvedt, we hear about a woman's move from the countryside of Minnesota, to the Big Apple in New York City. Her move is described with many comparisons with her previous life and experiences, and a lot of humor, which underlines her situation and her attitude to urban life. In the following essay I am going to analyze and comment on Siri Hustvedt’s essay “Living With Strangers”. Part of my essay will focus on the genre, the attitude to urban living and the contrasts between Siri’s life in Minnesota and her new life in New York City. As said, the essay is based on Siri Hustvedt’s own life and experiences. Siri Hustvedt grew up in Minnesota, where everybody knows and greets each other. Now she lives in New York City where nobody seems to care about each other, and where greeting strangers would be “impractical and unsound”. This is a big change for her, and she uses an overwhelming amount of detailed descriptions to describe her situation in the Big Apple. She uses many personal experiences and examples, which characterizes the essay genre. Furthermore, she is very reflective, descriptive, subjective and very personal in her way of writing the essay. “It didn’t take long for me to absorb the unwritten code of survival...
Words: 1138 - Pages: 5
...New York City is the place that I’ve wanted to visit since I was kid. Now that I’m here I don’t want to leave it anymore. When I walk the streets, I feel free. When coming from New Jersey to New York City on the New Jersey Transit Train, which is grimy but comfortable, it is an experience that I have never felt before. Crossing under the Hudson River and coming into the jam-packed station is reminiscent of having some kind of travel machine bringing you from earth to space in a flash. When I visited, I felt like doing anything and everything in the city. Living in America is a fantastic but living in New York City is something even better. As you stagger up those stairs to the city streets and you grasp the first breath of city air, you know you’ve made it and have found your freedom. The buildings are so astonishingly tall and eye-catching. They encompass the most distinctive architecture I have ever seen in my lifetime. Even though I’m from Mumbai, India, New York reminds me of my city back home in multiple ways. There are so many buildings here I find it hard to believe that man is capable of putting them up. The buildings look like they had plunged from God's hands and landed in one spot, where else but in New York City. As I make my way down the streets, I feel overwhelmed by people walking and talking in scores of different languages. Everyone has their own identity and their own idea of representing themselves, which is quite intriguing to me. Everyone is different...
Words: 637 - Pages: 3
...City of Art I have been living in the United States of America over four years. I am an international student. I lived in New Jersey, and Texas before, and been in many cities. .However none of them held me how New York City has held me before. The reason is the art of the buildings. My opinion of what art is, art is a perspective of a person that entertains him when he looks at this art one more time. New York is a great sample if this meaning. Whenever I walk in the city, the time just flies. That is because of there is always some building and architecture new to see in New York. When I look at the view of the Manhattan, I see an artwork that is made by a famous painter. Especially, at nights the lights of the skyscrapers look wonderful to me. There is nothing similar art as New York. If we look at the city as an art, the size of the work is not a compared size of a work. This art is not clay, stone, steel, paint, or technique but building. In New York City, every building has its own vertical, diagonal, horizontal, and planar its own. What makes it art is different characteristic of buildings was gathered together and made a both modern and old city together. For example, you can see an old skyscraper with an old design with a modern building with today’s design next to it. There is not a relationship between the buildings, but as I mentioned before when we look at the view of the Manhattan, everything look relevant to each other. The color of the city is grey, but there...
Words: 501 - Pages: 3
...What attracted you specifically to the study of Engineering in New York City? New York City represents many things in the American ethos but none more so than opportunity. For one, it is the financial heart of the United States of America, and the opportunities afforded by that distinction apply to the entire gamut of careers. While New York City is often associated with lawyers, stock brokers, or even the world’s fashion elite, engineers are not excluded from the array of opportunities. In fact, the aesthetic and practical prospects are varied and comprehensive. The first major benefit for an engineer living in New York City is the sheer inspiration. New York’s architectural designs, from the Statue of Liberty to the Empire State Building to the Chrysler Building, are an engineering marvel. As such, they serve as a great example of what can be accomplished with engineering. They are a testament to the direct products of engineering being more than functional. They serve as proof that they can transcend even into works of art. And nowhere is that as apparent as in New York City. This unparalleled variety of engineering feats constitutes a large part of the “New York advantage” for an engineer. While the educational road to engineering remains rooted in mathematics and theoretical work, New York is a unique and vibrant example of what can be mobilized with those theories. Even the most logically driven engineer would be persuaded of the great artistic and social implications...
Words: 650 - Pages: 3
...Living with strangers Every culture and society has different norms and ways of living their lives which can be difficult for others to understand. When you meet a stranger in the street in Minnesota it is almost considered compulsory to say hi when you pass by, at least where the author of the article “Living with strangers’’ is from. Her name is Siri Hustvedt and she wrote the essay in 2002 which was published in The New York Times. She moved from the country in Minnesota to New York City where addressing strangers on the street is considered very odd. Siri Hustvedt’s essay is inspired by this difference between the norms and ways of doing things. The title “Living with strangers” is a bit of a paradox, because living with someone would normally make them everything else than strangers. In Siri Hustvedts life that isn’t the case. She moves to New York City where there live a whole lot of people. In New York City you are surrounded by more and more people, nonetheless you get more and more isolated in your own little world. This isolation and exclusion from the world outside is what Siri Husvedt’s essay is based on. From her apartment she could hear and watch things which should have been kept private such as a couple arguing and men only wearing underwear. They could almost have been roommates or something but they were just fellow New Yorkers who had unintentionally shared private moments. She is living with strangers. “Pretend it isn’t happening”(p.1.l.20) is a law which...
Words: 956 - Pages: 4
...Rent Ceiling in New York City Living in Manhattan, New York, has always been a dream of mine. I imagined life in the fast lane, a city that never sleeps, and the hustle and bustle of life. I had no idea about the issues of rent stabilization and rent control and how those are considered ‘bad words’ when talking to individuals and/or families who are living in poverty without affordable housing. But not so fast. From a public policy, city government viewpoint, rent stabilization and rent control are a blessing for those who are benefiting from the perks. The entire notion of this housing ‘crisis’ in New York peaked my interest. New York has two forms of rent regulation: rent control and rent stabilization. Both of these are mandated by the New York State government with the overall intention to prevent the average city-dweller from getting priced out of the rental market. While reading the article and other materials about this subject matter, it was apparent that this topic is both controversial and a source of debate. Rent controlled apartments are those apartments in a building that were built before 1947 and have been occupied by the same family since 1971. These apartments can only be passed down within a family but more specific, to a family member living in the unit for two or more years before the existing tenant leaves or passes away. ‘Less than 2% of the apartments in NYC are rent controlled’ (Naked Apartments website, n.d.). Rent stabilization has no set requirements...
Words: 1030 - Pages: 5
...New York Apartment Price Controls – An Article Review Rent controls began in New York City in November 1943, when rent for all units in the city were frozen at their March 1943 levels as part of the U.S. Emergency Price Act of 1942 (Gyourko & Linneman, 1990). The price controls were altered by Federal Housing and Rent act of 1947, exempting units built after February 1947 from all future controls; New York City continued to price control rent on virtually all apartments constructed prior to 1947 (Gyourko & Linneman, 1990). Only about 1.8% of New Yorkers actually enjoy the securities of rent controlled apartments, 45.4% do live in rent stabilized accommodations where landlords are prohibited from increasing rates by a certain percentage each year (Pittman, 2013). The debate over rent control has been a long controversy; many argue that rent control is far too restrictive and that it makes apartment hunting almost impossible for many (due to the low supply in “affordable apartments”). The price ceilings set in place have been beneficial in terms of making living more affordable, but it also has created other problems. Tenants under controlled rent often stay longer, even it is deemed to be unsuitable for their living situations (ex: expansion in family) simply because it is affordable. Because tenants stay longer, it makes vacancy at certain controlled prices much harder for those who are living in unregulated accommodations (Pittman, 2013). As displayed...
Words: 663 - Pages: 3
...surprise. However, even though humans are difficult to figure out, we would say that there are mainly two different types of people in this world: Country-folk and city-folk. Susan Cheever is as mentioned earlier the writer of the essay My Little Bit of Country, and in this essay she reveals to us the thoughts and minds of a ‘city-person’. The story follows a chronological structure, and Susan Cheever starts the story with mentioning how she spent her summer mornings as a child in beautiful Central Park in company of her dad: “My earliest memories are of summer mornings in Central Park with my father” (Page: 1). When reading this essay, it becomes clear to see that Susan Cheever considers herself different from her family members: “I too often felt, even then at the age of three or four, that I had come from another exotic foreign place to live with my disappointingly ordinary family” (Page: 1, L.25) as this quote shows, she describes her family as being painfully ordinary, which clearly is a contrast to how she describes herself. The family decides to move away from New York because they desire better outdoors facilities, which is a bit of a shame since Susan Cheever enjoys living in New York. In this essay there are being dealt with numerous contrasts. Cheever mainly deals with the difference between the city and the suburbs, but she is also mentioning how her father...
Words: 909 - Pages: 4
...B ‘Living With Strangers’ An enforced closeness that exclusively belongs to boyfriends and family is something you cannot run from when being on the sidewalk in New York City. So is this the definition of the so-called living with strangers? Siri Hustvedt is an American author who in 2002 wrote the personal essay ‘Living With Strangers’. She simply raises the pros and cons of living together in the big city of New York – in a very non-simplistic way. With personal experiences and thoughts throughout the whole essay, she holds on to the reader’s attention from the very first line. I will mainly focus on the choice of genre, together with the linguistic instruments that Siri Hustvedt uses in her essay. There are a lot of basics that feature the characteristics of a personal essay. The personal essay is often focused on a belief or an insight about life. It combines elements as the narrative’s former experiences or relationships and raises questions about open answers. Only this genre permits Siri to be subjective on a topic where the essay still has a professional level of seriousness, while the intimate connection between sender and receiver creates a certain sense of ethos that helps Siri convincing her audience. This genre also gives Hustvedt the space to express her experiences in a way to convince us of her impression of “Living With Strangers”. Although, there is not a precise view being shared as the personal essay’s main argument: Instead it is more a meticulous reflection...
Words: 919 - Pages: 4
...In the writing “Beyond Mickey Mouse”, it is written that for over twenty years, Pixar computer animation studios have produced movies. Sketched by hand before Pixar, thousands of pictures were provided by artists for traditional animated films. Steve Jobs from Pixar, revolutionized animation. Animators used special software on computers to create speech and movement. Pixar’s animators invented startling authentic effects. Pixar’s original plot shows characters’ development as they move into the world, and receive support from their friend’s. In 1995, Toy Story was completed by computer animation, and was the first commercially successful Pixar film. Shortly after other successful movies trailed know as, A Bugs Life, Finding Nemo and The...
Words: 331 - Pages: 2
...individual, is now more likely to be single and living alone. Side by side with changing demographics, there is also an economic crisis with the affordability of housing and standard of living of individuals. One last condition, is the growing concern to be more conservational minded with the environment. Micro-housing residencies offer a small footprint in comparison to a typical home, both physically and environmentally. Micro-living is possible within a space that is just one hundred to four hundred feet. An individual is able to gain more financial freedom, if their own living is simplified. One third to one half of the common American income is dedicated towards paying for their need of a roof over their head. Going back to the condition that a tenant dweller in New York City faced, governmental involvement had made conditions present more livable. Legislation set a minimum for basic living, with access to sunlight and properly circulated air. These requirements until now prevented any further development into a minimal stylized life. Many of the United States populated cities, have looked toward the future that would be created with the establishment of more minimal communities within the borders of the city. One difference that exists is that for many cities, there exists no consistency of the minimum area of a residential unit. Square footage varies from two hundred and twenty in San Francisco, to four hundred in most parts of New York...
Words: 1102 - Pages: 5
...Living With Strangers Sometimes it can be a leap in the dark to move from a small city to a big city. You start somewhere new; an unknown place filled with new experiences, challenges and strangers. It can be overwhelming at first, and it might as well take some time to grow accustomed to the new culture and what the city has to offer. The situation can especially be difficult to someone who comes from a city, where one is used to live in closely encircling. As an example of this kind of situation is Siri Hustvedt’s essay ‘Living with Strangers’, which is written in 2002 Hustvedt describes in her essay her move from rural Minnesota to New York City in 1978 and how suddenly norms and rules change for her. In Minnesota it is the custom to greet everyone you meet on the road, even though you do not know the person. If you pass someone in silence, you will be considered as discourteous and it can lead to accusations of snobbery. This is the worst and rudest possible thing you can do and it gets compared as a sin in the egalitarian state. A good place to start is the title of the essay ‘Living With Strangers’, because it sums up the thesis in the text and Hustvedt’s point with the text. The title refers to a major problem in every city - whether it is a big or small one, and it is because the society that we live in now has changed and is still changing. The late modern society is characterized by the fact, that we no longer are bound by old traditions and habits. We are instead...
Words: 949 - Pages: 4
...The five points area had a very infamous reputation in 19th century New York City. The population was largely Irish and it was said to be the home of gang members and criminals of all types, and was mainly known as the home turf of Irish immigrant gangs. The five points received its name because it was the intersection of 5 streets, which formed five corners. The streets were: Mulberry, Little Water, Anthony, Cross, and Orange. Mulberry Street is the only street that still has its original name. While the neighborhood was predominantly Irish in the 1850s, there were also African Americans, Italians, and various other immigrant groups. The Irish were stereotypically described as criminals, violent and drunks. Unfortunately, the slum conditions and widespread crime of the Five Points only contributed to that attitude. The problems within the five points started with the five points area itself. The living conditions there were indescribably horrible. “See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly”(Doc. A). Tenements in the Five Points were made from wood and brick. The wooden structures measured about twenty to twenty five feet wide and twenty five to thirty feet deep, and stood two and a half stories high at most. These buildings were originally intended for shopkeepers businesses, and were meant to house their families and perhaps a few employees. By the 1850s, most of these shops had been made into small...
Words: 1151 - Pages: 5
...Living with Strangers In the essay “Living with Strangers” Siri Hustvedt discusses the lack of solidarity and the difference between the unspoken social rules, one can meet in a in a big city, for example New York City, and a small town in the state of Minnesota. These unspoken social rules are very hard for an outsider to understand. Hustvedt starts the essay by giving a briefly description of the huge difference she felt, when she moved from rural Minnesota to New York City. She talks about how one is expected to behave where she grew up. It was considered as rude and snobby to pass someone in silence – which is pretty much the worst thing in a small town – you have to say “Hi”. “Passing someone in silence wasn’t only rude; it could lead to accusations of snobbery – the worst possible sin in my small corner of egalitarian state (paragraph 3-5)”. Whereas in New York City it will make you seem mental greeting a stranger if you were to greet everyone you meet on the street. It is this problematic issue that has inspired Siri Hustvedt to write the essay. The title refers to the paradox living in a big city: on one hand you live among so many people and on the other you do not know these people so you are really on your own. Although this is not specifically mentioned; but she indicates it indirectly through an anecdote about the habits of her neighbors “...I listened to the howling battles of the couple the lived below me, their raging voices punctuated by thuds, bangs, and the...
Words: 766 - Pages: 4
...Living With Strangers – By Siri Hustvedt Everybody know that it can be tough to move to another city, and some people have try to move away from their parents, or from an apartment to a house outside of town. But it is not everybody who knows how hard it can be to move to another place. In Siri Hustvedts “Living With Strangers” we hear about her and her family who move from Minnesota to New York City. She has a tough time in the “Big Apple” because she has just moved away from a city where everybody said “Hello” to each and to a city where everybody just ignores each other. “It didn’t take long for me to absorb the unwritten code of survival in this town – a convention communicated silently but forcefully. This simply law, one nearly every New Yorker subscribes to whenever possible, is; PRETEND IT ISN’T HAPPENING”. This sentence shows how the New Yorkers treat other people in public. But how is it to live side by side with people you hear and see, but do not know? This story by Siri Hustvedt is about how tough it can be to move from one city to another. In this case it is from Minnesota to New York City - Two different cities. She used to say “hey” to everybody she meets, but that is not standard procedure in New York, and she is not comfortable about all the people and their ignorant way to live their life in the big city. She tells stories about people she meets in public and their way to act in the big city. She has a hard time figure out how to react on people behaviour...
Words: 1044 - Pages: 5
