Infinite Content, Infinitely Content

Two weeks. Two weeks until school is done. Two weeks until the trial of junior year is done. Two weeks until we fly over the white city turned gray by years and bombs, and land in Belgrade. Two weeks until I sit in the old, red, air-condition lacking Škoda my uncle drives and cross the bridge into the city, with the view of a sort of grandiose, socialist-era corner building. My escape into the city. Two weeks until Serbia, the only consistent place I’ve gone every summer, my own Sag Harbor. Like Benji, summer has thus become a sort of periodic experience of cultural shifting, as he navigated the weird shift from being in a white community to a black community. He has to catch up with a bunch of people he sees only once a year, and while being a part of their community he constantly feels like he has to catch up on things. And he’s always in an odd place of in between both cultures. That’s what it’s always like for me over the summer, going back to Serbia. My American-ess becomes both ...

As the composer Igor Stravinsky said, “The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit,”. This is at least how I, and undoubtedly some of you guys, felt about this project. You’re given a pretty limited set of requirements for what you can write, established characters, setting, et cetera. But within those limits, I found it all of a sudden a lot easier to write something. The combinations and possibilities were extremely fascinating. My story is from Esther’s perspective ten years later, in 1963, when she’s a writer and return to New York City. She meets Holden and they get to know each other a bit. It’s a story that looks at both of them ten years on, but now in the context of the 1963 political crises and culture (although part of the story is that things haven’t changed that much yet). My goal was to follow Esther’s thoughts over two days with Holden, and see where it goes. It's titled In Open Air, sort of "the opposite...