I surprise myself with my fondness for cities. I think often about the achy, regenerative, organic lives of metropolises. I guess that I find the idea of cities to be reaffirming, optimistic. It surprises and amazes that so many monkeys can climb over each other in close cohabitation without constant, bloody, conflict. It makes me proud to think that we can give each other the many concessions required to share space.
I reckon that there is no small share of naiveté in there, in my pining for a dream city of markets and parks and swirling energies. This is probably the same romantic impulse that moves longing for wilderness and forgotten spaces. It might even be the natural urge of a suburban child for the extremes that represent the exotic Other that feeds these kinds of thoughts.
Sigh. But Paris in springtime, summer in London, autumnal New York? The dreary alloy of urban winters and the hundred-thousand coffee shop hearths that string a city-dweller through long, cold, nights? Museums and memories and newness, nasty and nice? Decay and growth: The ecologies of economy and race and emotion, wrought in steel and stone and mayoral offices and free kitchens and lonely apartments? There is a very real, very important, way in which this is the human enterprise and there will always be a part of me that wants to participate.
