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Bridge | Nov 06 2005

Whenever I walk across a bridge, particularly here in New York, I note the moment I’m halfway across. Often it’s the highest point of the walk. The grade can be subtle, so it’s easy to miss it. On some bridges the spot is marked to indicate the border between places. The Washington bridge, which connects Manhattan and the Bronx, is like this: a line in the center divides the territory of the two boroughs.

I started noticing this line, this moment (for it’s both a time and a place), a few years back, when I lived in Williamsburg and would walk home from the Lower East Side across the Williamsburg bridge. If I had time I would stop in the middle, here marked with a thick yellow line, and take in the view south, a view that includes two neighboring bridges, first the Manhattan, then the Brooklyn.

From a probabilistic perspective, I’m just over halfway across my life, middle-aged in the most literal sense. I believe I first realized this a few years ago, on the Williamsburg bridge. I knew it before but hadn’t really grasped what it meant. Perhaps I still haven’t.

For a time I wondered if the analogy was upside-down, if it would be better if the bridge, like a shallow bowl, sloped slightly downward to the middle, then up again, so as to better represent one’s approach to death, which from where I stand seems more like a slow climb than an easy descent.

But now I see it the other way. The approach to death is indeed a descent, one that occurs, in the ideal, when we are “over the hill.” And this hill, or rather its peak, sits in the middle of our lives, as far from the beginning as from the end, equidistant from cradle and grave.