Passage 5

Many people find New York an unattractive city to inhabit because of the physical filth, and while, God knows, the city is filthy, I doubt that that element plays an important role in our decision to leave. Naples is far dirtier, and so are Bombay and countless other cities, but a tolerance for dirt seems to grow where some fondness exists. Tangiers is one of the dirtiest cities in the world, yet a friend of mine who possesses flawless taste lives in the casbah there and would live nowhere else. A few days ago in Central Park I saw a man leaning on a litter can drinking a carton of orange juice, and when he finished he tossed the container not in the receptacle but on the ground.

I don’t understand this, but there is a lot about New York I don’t understand. Mainly, I don’t understand why the city has no soul, no detectable heartbeat, why the chief element in the city’s emotional economy is indifference. I think that’s what sent me on my way. Vienna almost suffocates the Viennese with care, Paris manages to imbue her own with an obsession for their fulfillment, San Francisco exudes a pride that even gathers to her heart total strangers; but the key to New York’s character is that it doesn’t really care about anything. Across the court from the Manhattan apartment that I have occupied for the past few years is a dog that quite often hurls insults into the darkness, a few of which my dog refuses to accept service on and makes a tart reply. I think I yearn for the people of New York to do somewhat the same thing; I would like to think they possess a nature that could be stimulated by something.

A number of New Yorkers have been driven from the city by fear; by the feeling that they are besieged and that if they venture too far from their neighborhoods they will be mugged or, worse, murdered. I have never been mugged or physically molested in any way, possibly because my large build does not make me an ideal prospect for a hoodlum. Yet I recall the lady who was buying a magazine in the Port Authority Bus Terminal one evening when a stranger walked up and disemboweled her with a butcher knife. Later arrested, he told police that he didn’t know the lady but “just felt like killing somebody.” It’s impossible to protect oneself from such madness, and I think it is the fool in New York who is not a coward at heart.

I recall, too, the New Year’s Eve when, after a dinner party, a friend of mine went down to the street to get a taxicab and the cab veered too quickly and hit him. His wife and I took him in the cab to Lenox Hill Hospital, and while we were trying to get emergency treatment for him the cabdriver was screaming at us for his fare. A few weeks ago a fifteen-year-old girl was raped on a subway train. The next day the police expressed the opinion that the girl was partially responsible for the act because she had entered a car in which there were no other passengers. All of these things may happen in other large cities, and undoubtedly do, but they reflect a lack of caring, a sickness of the soul, that I find difficult to accept and impossible to forget.

What’s the meaning of the word “filthy” in the first sentence?

According to the author, ________ is the key character of the city New York.

The man killed the lady with a butcher knife because ________.

Why was the cabdriver screaming at the author and his friends?

Which of the following was not the reason why the author left New York?