'Pride or Prejudice,' from 'Our Boston: Writers Celebrate the City They Love': The New Yorker I seldom went to Boston during my first two years in Cambridge. After spending a weekend with my parents in New York, I'd be back by train late Sunday afternoon, get off at Boston's South Station, and immediately hop on the Red Line to Harvard Square. Once underground, I had already turned my back on Boston, eager to be in time for dinner with friends around the Square. I did get off the train once at Boston's Back Bay station, but that was by mistake, and right away, after speedily scrambling through streets, found my way back to the Red Line and was soon enough back in Cambridge without even realizing that I'd finally actually been on Commonwealth Avenue that day. I did venture forth to Newton once on the Green Line for a part-time-job interview, and friends did persuade me to join them on a group visit to the Museum of Fine Arts one desultory Saturday afternoon during my first fall in Cambridge. There'd also been a couple of errands for food around Haymarket Square. But all of these were sporadic trips that rarely lasted more than a couple of hours. Before I knew it, Boston was already behind me. Boston was far. Boston was across the bridge. Boston was another world. I didn't have a feel for Boston, Boston never got under my skin. Each one of us has his or her way of reaching out to a new city, of narrowing the distance between us and the world. Some unpack everything they've got and are ready to settle in. Others live out of their suitcases for weeks into months, as though ready to run away at a moment's notice. Some have a sprint in their gait when they arrive in new cities - confident, curious, eager - while others work their way out ever so gingerly, like wary snails spiraling out to take furtive peeks before slithering back in. They distrust too many streets for fear of getting lost, they never speak to strangers, they and never ask directions when they do get lost. Then there is my way - the most feral of all. I turn my back, I shut down, I refuse to explore, won't listen, won't budge, won't care, won't negotiate, and will always play hard to get. A place must come to me, court me, want me, not the other way around. Recalcitrance, after all, is seldom more than diffidence wearing a mask. For months I'd behaved no differently with Cambridge. My Harvard universe was confined to a strip of four to five blocks on Massachusetts Avenue, with a mere two blocks extending over to Battle Street, along with the area immediately surrounding my dorm. This was Cambridge, my Cambridge, my comfort zone. Might as well have been living in a gated community. I never ventured beyond. It took me forever to realize that from Brattle I could cross over to the Cambridge Common, head north to Waterhouse Street, reach Everett Street, and be back to my dorm on Oxford Street. Still longer to realize that Mount Auburn eventually intersected Mass. Ave., or that Boylston Street could take me from Harvard Square to, of all things, a huge body of water that people called the Charles. What was the Charles, a river or an estuary? I wasn't sure, couldn't be bothered, sooner or later I'd find out anyway, so why rush? Here I was having spent months at Harvard without even realizing there was a river nearby, and along this river a row of majestic river houses. What were river houses? Couldn't begin to tell. All these would have to come to me, one by one. And always, it seems, by happenstance. Which is how life takes things into its own hands. Some people, armed with foresight and will, cross oceans to discover new worlds, new lives, new ways of doing everything. I've come to know my planet and ultimately my life inadvertently, without meaning to, almost against my will. Some people study maps to know what to look for, where to go, how to set their bearings so as never to get lost. I have no inner sense of what a city looks like on paper, what are its focal points, or how a park or a river might separate one precinct from another. Boston's Marlborough, Newberry, and Beacon Streets may parallel one another, but to me they might as well belong to altogether different neighborhoods, because I've come to each from a different direction, on different errands, with different friends. In fact, I've seldom ever had to cross from Marlborough over to Beacon Street. These streets could just as well belong to different cities, different time zones, different itineraries, and ultimately to different selves. Who I was in Copley Square with a girlfriend one day is in no way the same person I was two years later on Faneuil Hall when I stopped by a store to buy a down jacket. One self couldn't possibly have known the other. As it turns out, these two areas adjoin each other. But I would never have known it at the time, much less known how to get from one to the other. I never connect the dots. I am so little interested in the layout of a city that I can live years in a place without looking at a map. What I go by instead is a sort of inner compass. Its needle is magnetized to nothing whatsoever in the real world, but it is aligned to a capricious pole that is in me and only me. Until that needle begins to stir and to respond to a city, the city does not exist. It is only by stumbling that I discover my real districts, my real quarters, my intimate sestieri and personal arrondissements, spaces that are no less twisted and unreal on the ground than I am warped and insecure within. One day, after lunching with a friend, we decided to stroll around the Quincy Market area, which is when it suddenly dawned on me that Boston's Italian neighborhood was just across the street. We crossed over to Hanover Street and found an outdoor café with plastic chairs and an umbrella, ordered espressos, and split a cannoli. As we sat on the sidewalk under the blinding summer sun, suddenly, like a timid cat, Boston started sidling up to me. The needle in my compass quivered. Inadvertently, I had let my guard down, and, without knowing, the moment had finally come. I didn't want to lose this moment. That same spot outside that café on Hanover Street became my lodestone, my magnetic pole. At first Boston courted me, the way the Sirens did: with voices from the past. After lunch I would sometimes head to the Italian neighborhood because, with or without friends, just sitting in the sun with coffee summoned Italy for me, and with this illusion of Italy fluttering and billowing like thin muslin sheer over Boston's North End came the comforting presence of something I'd known many years earlier: the Mediterranean. I was almost home. Soon enough, Boston began to stir my compass with more familiar images. Crossing the Longfellow Bridge on the Red Line from Kendall Square over to Boston and being suddenly struck by the massive span of water splitting the city in two was just like riding the Étoile-Nation Line in Paris on the Pont de Bir-Hakeim and facing the Seine on the way to Passy. How I loved that moment when both underground trains, in Boston as in Paris, come up for air as they cross a bridge and, after showcasing the most expansive river views of their city, chuff back down underground, serenely, having accomplished their mission. Then one night, riding in a friend's car along Storrow Drive by the Esplanade and glimpsing all those faraway lights shimmering across the river on Memorial Drive, I was for a few moments back to my childhood. This was uncannily familiar; I could not ignore it. Boston had used whatever means it had, broken through all my defenses, and found its way in. I had resisted as best I could; now it was time to yield. Sometimes we reject a place for fear it might reject us and not welcome us at all. Or we reject it fearing disappointment, especially if we invest so much time getting to know it. Small towns, like beautiful Volpaia in Tuscany and Saint-Rémy in Provence, are easy to know. They do not intimidate; in the space of an hour, we may already be on familiar terms. But a large city threatens us, resists all of our measly attempts to master it, and instead asks us to surrender. Some of us don't wish to give in. We may not even want to admit how little we know and how much there is to learn; this may take years, we say. So we shut down. Or we learn to take things in by the bite-size, by installment, on spec, on consignment. Perhaps we fear our period of adjustment may never end and that we're destined to remain strangers. So why even bother? We keep our luggage handy and refuse to throw overboard things we may no longer need. We call it prudence. Then one day, by virtue of cobbling together pockets of memory along scattered areas and streets of Boston, I had not only managed to set up familiar corners in an unfamiliar city, but by seeking out these areas for what they were and not for what they reminded me of elsewhere, I had, without even knowing it, made them my own and layered over them the story of my own passage here, so that walking on the shady, brick-laid sidewalks of Buckingham Street one midmorning day in May, I knew I was finally discovering and loving Cambridge, and that if I could grow to love Cambridge then I might just as easily grow to love the brick-laid sidewalks of Marlborough Street on a sunny day in May - which is indeed what happened - and from Marlborough, I could radiate farther out and discover Commonwealth Avenue and Newberry Street and Beacon Street and Boylston Street and the Boston Common, areas I had seen before but hadn't noticed, or ever deigned to consider, like someone who needed to meet the same woman again and again to realize that all along there was more love in his heart than either pride or prejudice. 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