I had a friend at college who didn’t believe in Wyoming. He said that it, not England, was a conspiracy of cartographers. I believe among his supporting evidence was its suspiciously regular shape.

“And think about it,” said he, “have you ever met anyone who’s been to Wyoming?”

“Yes,” I said, with sundry smirks.

He was a little perturbed, as this had never happened before, “Well have you ever met anyone from Wyoming?”

“Yes,” I proclaimed with mounting smugness.

“Well, but, have you ever been to Wyoming?”

“Yes, actually,” I remarked with Ultimate Nonchalant Smugness. He spluttered and subsided into the wreck of a glorious theory.

I realized this morning, as I drove to work to the strains of P.J. Harvey’s Songs from the City, Songs from the Sea, that I take rather the opposite approach in my belief in places. I do not believe in New York.

Yes, many people have been there. I had a cousin who went off to university there (though you’ll note I haven’t seen her since). I have friends who have visited there (bedrick) and even a friend who lives there (novel.) I have heard its name and constituent organs sung of in many a song, seen its face in newspapers, seen its press of folk and its buildings in movies and on television. And, you see, that is precisely the problem. To me, New York is not a place, but a complex amalgam of concepts, stories, an avatar of Cityness. New York is not a real place, but a backdrop for a million stories. Too many things are supposed to happen there for it to be real. It is too many things to too many people to be anything other than a well-developed fiction. Whereas I have tasted the bland spreading highways, the dirty cleanness and pristine filth that is LA, and whereas I have stayed in Chicago long enough to hear and feel, as it were from far off, a little of its pulse and music; New York has no such breath of reality to animate the much-shaped clay in my mind. It is too multifarious and too seminal to actually exist outside of analogy.

And maybe in a way, despite the ludicrousness of my non-belief in New York, I am right. The New York in which Seinfeld lives, where Tony and Maria met, where art and theatre thrive and Spiderman catches purse-snatchers, where accents pinpoint the borough of origin, where immigrants see America for the first time — it doesn’t exist. The New York that lives in the minds of those of us out here, far away, never likely to see it, is not a real city, and maybe, if we did meet the real one, we would be just a little disappointed.