Somehow, there’s been quite a lot of New York in my life this autumn. Looking back, it started with my dear friend coming over to Moscow and giving me this beautiful greetings card for my birthday. A couple of months later I finally watched the film Serendipity, whose action takes place mostly in New York, and the following day I suddenly decided to listen to Frank Sinatra’s beautiful album ‘Where Are You?’. A song called Lonely Town begins with the following words: ‘New York, New York/ Or a village in Iowa/ The only difference is the name/ If you’re alone/ Whether on Main Street/ Or on Broadway/ If you’re alone/ They are both the same’. Then I ended up watching the first season of Sex and the City, and right in episode two an attractive model named Derek confessed to Carrie Bradshaw after a fashion show that he felt lonely in New York and wanted to ‘move back to Iowa and have kids and be a cop’. Isn’t it a reference? And then last week at the ISU Grand Prix of Figure Skating Internationaux de France in Grenoble Alena Kostornaia presented a beautiful short programme entitled ‘New York, New York’.
Going back to the word ‘serendipity’, it has an interesting etymology. According to Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, it was coined in 1754 by Horace Walpole, suggested by The Three Princes of Serendip, the title of a fairy tale in which the heroes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of”. To my mind, it correlates with a beautiful quote by Paolo Coelho, which I discovered the other day thanks to my soulsister: ‘We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen’. As for Horace Walpole, he was an eighteenth-century English writer and politician, and the author of the first gothic novel The Castle of Otranto. Curiously, my soulsister and I talked about Bram Stoker’s Dracula that day too. And I’ve just realized we also discussed cheesecakes – a dessert that is inextricably linked with New York – but again, that’s probably another (food) story.
26/11/2021