A while back I read Soft City by Jonathan Raban, a book about urban life and city living, written in 1974. I think the basic thesis is that it is the citiness itself that distinguishes life there from villages and towns; and those that are looking for a village feel will always be disappointed, and angry, with city life. Indeed, it is those that have spurned the supposed positives of village and town life who do well and can thrive in the brutal apathy of the city (I’d add that I think this scales up too – life in megacities is very different to those in cities, and again requires a different mindset and needs, and coping mechanisms).
So, some quotes – page numbers from the 2008 Picador paperback –
p16 – “It is the very success of the city as an economic unit which causes its downfall as a spiritual republic, and that paradox is the hardest of truths for Augustine to bear. The city of man ought to be a harmonious reflection of the coty of God; in actuality, it is vulgar, lazy and corrupt, a place so brutish that it lacks even the dignity of the Satanic. Better the beseiged city than the corpulent city, better poverty than wealth; for whatever nourishes the city chokes it too.”
p41 – “The western entry to London has astonishing feats of gothic whimsy, built in brick of inky scarlet, crowding beneath giant signboards on which airlines promise you that the earth is yours… Indeed, what better function for the late gothic style could be imagined, than to adorn the entrance to a dream… And if you come to London from the north, there is the heady baroque span of Archway Bridge on the scarpface of Highgate Hill and Hampstead Heath – the ‘northern heights’ as they were grandly known in the nineteenth century. The Archway has the best view of London as it drops down to the Thames, five miles south. It is also the best place to commit suicide; and nearly every week someone takes the plunge into the swirl of container trucks below, and Archway Road is noisy with klaxons of ambulances and fire engines – a macabre living theatre of urban promise, urban disillusion.”
p88 – “The trade in purchasable identities absorbed Dickens in Our Mutual Friend; yet, by modern standards, the industry is primitive and circumscribed… the first question the Boffins apply themselves in their parlour is whether or not to ‘have a go-in for Fashion’. Set free into a dizzying world of total choice, they decide in the course of a single page how they will live, who they are going to be.”
p117 – “the consumer’s habitual form, in both art and life, is the epigram – that compressed, disconnected, transistorised circuit of language which transcends history and continuity by the exactitude with which it illuminates the instant. Buying a rubber alligator is an epigram: a rapid, oblique, witty gesture that transforms an object into an idea by the mere act of acquisition.”
p130 – “In London in the last few years such ideas have been sounded more frequently than any others over soup at the Veneerings’: the zoological model of human society as propounded by writers like Desmond Morris and Jane Goodall, the basic theory of Lévi-Strauss’s system of structural anthropology, and the most abstract and intellectually titivating aspects of ecology. They have a number of features in common. Each one lends itself to being stated in an epigrammatic form. Each reduces the world to a simple universal model. Each offers some kind of general explanation about the nature of human society. Each has its own occultly-scientific technical jargon… The fashionable philosophies of Herbert Marcuse, Marshall McLuhan and Noam Chomsky have proved themselves capable of being transmitted as slogans, often to the alarm of their originators. They have been turned into industrial objects – cheap, easily acquired things that have a brief popular currency and are the discarded.”
p199 – “‘form is a mere illusory manifestation of underlying causes.’ It is the same consoling message that the Situationists and the Hare Krishna people preach; believe it, and the city, with all its paradoxes, puzzles, and violent inequities, will float away before your eyes… The computer dating agency and the horoscope render a similar service: science (especially mystical mathematics) are closely allied – both promise to rip the veil from the troubling world at one sweep… The people who float on the tide of metaphysical junk – freaks of all kinds… into macrobiotics, yoga, astrology, illiterate mysticism, acid, terrible poetry by Leonard Cohen and tiny novels by Richard Brautigan – have managed, at a price. The new folk magic of the streets promises to have some unhappy poetical consequences but as a way of responding to the city it does reflect a truth about the nature of the place which we had better learn to confront.”
p247 – “A great deal of English poverty is borne amiably, with the air of long, tolerant habituation. No London slum has the raw, exposed, beaten appearance of these sinks of American urban poverty… I like cities on principle; but in America, my liking was rapidly turning sour, my enthusiasm was beginning to seem to me glib and blinkered.”
p255 – “By sheer force of will, Bostonians have made these ancient cartographers’ divisions real, mythologising them into actuality by a massive conspiracy of Cartesian concentration… To a European, these sudden abrupt transitions within the city are amazing; he can measure to the inch where poverty stops and starts… The ghettoes – or villages – are real because Boston, in common with the majority of American cities, feared the unmanageable bigness of New York or London.”
p286 – “Cities are scary and impersonal, and the best most of us can manage is a fragile hold on our route through the streets. We cling to friends and institutions, exaggerate the importance of belonging, fear being alone too much. The freedom of the city is enormous. Here one can choose and invent one’s society, and live more deliberately than anywhere else. Nothing is fixed, the possibilities of personal change and renewal are endless and open. But it is hard to learn to live as generously as real citizenship demands. I spot in others the same mouse-like caution which keeps me hugging the edge of the pavement, running from bolthole to bolthole, unequipped to embrace the spaciousness and privacy of city life which so often presents itself as mere emptiness and fog.”
p289 – “But on the far edge of each engagement there is always the unfathomed area of panic, when you know that you have to flop back again into the crowd. These moments of privacy and recognition and intense communicativeness are delicate bubbles, and in time they burst. You sustain your conversation, or the perfect angle of the cue ball on the black against the city. I keep most things going too long, am reluctant to leave.”
p292 – “Its discontinuities give one vertigo; few people who aren’t criminals or psychopaths will risk themselves on the rollercoaster ride of change and incongruity which the city offers. So much of city life is an elaborate process of building up defenses against the city – the self a fortified town raised against the stranger… It could perhaps be otherwise; but we shall need more daring, more cool understanding than we are displaying at the present. We live in cities badly; we have built them up in culpable innocence and now fret helplessly in a synthetic wilderness of our own construction.”
That’s it, I’m leaving and moving to the west county ;-) (t minus eight days)
— Mark Fowler 14.05.09 #
On a similar note; everything said above can be somewhat translated to ‘living on the Internet’ which is a hyper inflated version of infinite choice and the need to belong; the global virtual city.
— Mark Fowler 14.05.09 #
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