Shadowhunters and Downworlders

I don’t really remember when I started to want to fight back. I don’t even remember whether that’s really how I looked at it. The way I remember it was that I started looking for evidence that this city wasn’t what it had first shown itself to be. I started looking for what it was hiding under the indifferent, hurried, even cruel face it seemed intent on putting on for me. I started grasping at moments that weren’t misery. Slowly, slowly, I found them. And at some point along the way, New York City began to feel like home.

Then, some time after that, New York began to change for me once more. Having found its homely side at last, I let myself open my eyes again to the unhomely, this time looking for the other hidden face of the city, its quirks and oddities and bits of delightful weirdness. When I’d been sure the city was out to get me, these things would have been lumped in with the things that made New York seem unknowable and sinister. Now, though, I discover those things and am fascinated by them without feeling that they make the city not like home. It takes looking around you with a certain type of eye, though. You have to be willing to walk down an alley just because of the interesting ironwork on the fire escapes. It has to occur to you to look under an awning to see the decades-old sign beneath, a treasure hidden (almost) in plain view. You have to be willing to look up occasionally, a thing that, in New York, where so much is going on at eye level, sometimes takes conscious effort to remember to do.

You have to force yourself to give things more than a passing glance. You have to look at a thing long enough for it to really show itself to you—a skill Clary has to learn in order to see past the glamours masking things all around her. “Let your mind relax,” Jace instructs when trying to help Clary see a rune on his hand. “Wait for it to come to you. Like waiting for something to rise to the surface of water.” Staring at the stronghold masquerading as an abandoned hospital on Roosevelt Island, Clary tries “to stare around the lights, or through them, the way you could sometimes look past a thin topcoat of paint to see what was underneath” (City of Bones). Seeing past the glamour—past the superficial—takes effort, but it’s a critical step Clary has to take in order to reconcile what she has been seeing with what’s really there and to walk confidently through the city she thought was home as something more than an interloper. It’s the only way she can learn to navigate the once-familiar streets without getting lost, and without being afraid.

Every city, every town, hides beneath a certain amount of glamour that—either intentionally or not—can misdirect the eye or hide something worth finding. Learning to see through those glamours is part of the process of calling any place home.




I don’t know if everyone goes through this passage, in which his or her ability to function as a complete person is somehow tied to the process of becoming functional in an unfamiliar place. Moving to a new town or starting college can be like that, although I suspect that the necessity of learning to function socially outweighs or at least overshadows the necessity of learning to function on the campus or in the new town itself. In either setting, it’s more likely to be the people than the specific place that make you feel acutely like the outsider you are. There is something inherently stranger in discovering that it isn’t the people that are keeping you from feeling like you belong—it’s the place itself. Perhaps this is why so many people simply can’t fathom living in a city (or, conversely, can’t fathom living outside of one).

I also don’t know if the concept of being lost still means what it used to. My generation and the ones that follow have been trained, if not raised, to navigate by GPS, taking the shortest route from point A to point B. We have been trained to use turnpikes and highways; if we have lost our fears of being lost, it’s because the idea has lost its meaning. Take away our ability to know where we are at any given point, and I suspect we would immediately find ourselves in strange territory, even if geographically we are very close to home.

There is a very easy way of demonstrating the truth of this in New York City. You just get on an unfamiliar train and take it to another borough. Pick a stop you’ve never been to, and get out. Voilà! A whole new world. What’s even stranger is when you get out at an unfamiliar stop, turn a corner or two, and find yourself at an intersection or a landmark you know well. Because I like to wander both on foot and in a car just to see where I wind up, this happens to me all the time, but never without a moment’s feeling of having somehow experienced something uncanny. It’s this experience I thought of when reading the chapter in City of Bones in which, on returning to her apartment building in Park Slope and falling through a five-dimensional door, Clary lands not in some other country or other world but in the front yard of her “uncle” Luke’s home in Williamsburg, just a couple miles to the north, and still in Brooklyn. Even places you know well can take on a touch of the unknown when you arrive there from a different direction.