Perspectives | On Cities

By Jacobs, Durrell, Walser and others

Welcome back to The Humanities Library, where this week I've been neglecting chores and responsibilities to read about cities. Inspired by T.S. Eliot's mesmerising Preludes, which I chanced upon reading again this week, I've been gathering together writing that captures the restless, hypnotic energy of urban life.

Across different times and places, a few themes emerge. For many writers, the city is a living organism. Robert Carlyle, for example, describes London as a spirit of thought, whilst Fante’s desert waits patiently for the city to crumble as if urban life is only ever temporary. Monet, better than anyone, captures a city always on the verge of transformation with the blurred movement and swirling atmosphere of his Boulevard des Capucines.

Elsewhere, writers dwell upon the city as a theatre for those wishing to remain anonymous. Walser, Eliot, and Baudelaire all fixate on the way people in cities are both seen and unseen, whilst the fleeting romantic connections of Before Sunrise and Chungking Express emphasise how easy it is to be alone in a sea of people.

Meanwhile, Dickens, Betjeman and Durrell offer images, both bleak and exhilarating, of the city as a machine of industry, vibrating with the chaotic energy of commerce or dehumanising inhabitants with the monotony of daily life.

I hope you enjoy as much as I did. We'll have something on nature next time for all of our country mice.

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John Marin, Manhattan Skyline, 1911

I

The winter evening settles down / With smell of steaks in passageways. / Six o’clock. / The burnt-out ends of smoky days. / And now a gusty shower wraps / The grimy scraps / Of withered leaves about your feet / And newspapers from vacant lots; / The showers beat / On broken blinds and chimney-pots, / And at the corner of the street / A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

And then the lighting of the lamps.

II

The morning comes to consciousness / Of faint stale smells of beer / From the sawdust-trampled street / With all its muddy feet that press / To early coffee-stands.

With the other masquerades / That time resumes, / One thinks of all the hands / That are raising dingy shades / In a thousand furnished rooms.

III

You tossed a blanket from the bed, / You lay upon your back, and waited; / You dozed, and watched the night revealing / The thousand sordid images / Of which your soul was constituted; / They flickered against the ceiling. / And when all the world came back / And the light crept up between the shutters / And you heard the sparrows in the gutters, / You had such a vision of the street / As the street hardly understands; / Sitting along the bed’s edge, where / You curled the papers from your hair, / Or clasped the yellow soles of feet / In the palms of both soiled hands.

IV

His soul stretched tight across the skies / That fade behind a city block, / Or trampled by insistent feet / At four and five and six o’clock; / And short square fingers stuffing pipes, / And evening newspapers, and eyes / Assured of certain certainties, / The conscience of a blackened street / Impatient to assume the world.

I am moved by fancies that are curled / Around these images, and cling: / The notion of some infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh; / The worlds revolves like ancient women / Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

Preludes By T. S. Eliot, Preludes, 1910-1911

‘By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.’

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Street, Dresden. 1908

‘…in the running of cities, virtually nothing is done by anyone that is conducive to political health, nor is there a single ally with whom one might go to the aid of justice and still remain alive; it would be a case of a solitary human among wild animals, neither wanting to join in their depredations nor able to stand alone against their collective savagery, dead before he'd done any good to his city or friends and useless both to himself and everybody else. Once a person has made all these calculations, he keeps his peace and minds his own business, like someone withdrawing from the prevailing wind into the shelter of a wall in a storm of dust or rain, and as he sees everyone else filling themselves full of lawlessness he is content if he himself can somehow live out life here untainted by injustice and impious actions, and leave it with fine hopes and in a spirit of kindness and good will.’

Plato, The Republic, 375 BC

‘Statues beckon you from gardens and parks; still you keep on walking, giving everything a passing glance: things in motion and things fixed in place, hackney cabs indolently lumbering along, the electric tram just now starting its run, from whose windows human eyes regard you, a constable's idiotic helmet, a person with tattered shoes and trousers, a person of no doubt erstwhile high standing who is sweeping the street in a top hat and fur coat; you glance at everything, just as you yourself are a fleeting target for all these other eyes. That is what is so miraculous about a city: that each person's bearing and conduct vanishes among all these thousand types, that everything is observed in passing, judgments made in an instant, and forgetting a matter of course.’

Robert Walser, Berlin Stories

Claude Monet, Boulevard des Capucines, 1874

‘What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters.’

Charles Baudelaire, Mademoiselle Bistouri, 1869

‘Who wouldn't enjoy meeting nobles? Who wouldn't enjoy chatting with their peers? Visiting the forum, practising honest arts, pursuing their own affairs through the courts, occasionally playing board games, going to the baths with their friends, giving dinner parties with lavish reciprocity??’

Cassiodorus, Letters, c. 500

‘This London City, with all its houses, palaces, steam-engines, cathedrals, and huge immeasurable traffic and tumult, what is it but a Thought, but millions of Thoughts made into One a huge immeasurable Spirit of a THOUGHT, embodied in brick, in iron, smoke, dust, Palaces, Parliaments, Hackney Coaches, Katherine Docks, and the rest of it!

Not a brick was made but some man had to think of the making of that brick.’

Thomas Carlyle, The Hero as a Man of Letters, 1841

‘Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough! / It isn't fit for humans now, / There isn't grass to graze a cow. / Swarm over, Death!

Come, bombs and blow to smithereens / Those air -conditioned, bright canteens, / Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans, / Tinned minds, tinned breath.

Mess up the mess they call a town-’

John Betjeman, Extract from Slough, 1937

‘A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all of Zaira's past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of its streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.’

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1972

Still from Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, 1995

‘I remember one wintry January evening when I was hurrying home from the Vyborg side. I was still very young then. When I reached the Neva, I stopped for a minute and threw a piercing glance along the river into the smoky, frostily dim distance, which had suddenly turned crimson with the last purple of a sunset that was dying over the hazy horizon. Night lay over the city.... Fro-zen steam poured from tired horses, from running people. The taut air quivered at the slightest sound, and columns of smoke like giants rose from all the roofs on both embankments and rushed upward through the cold sky, twining and untwining on the way, so it seemed that new buildings were rising above the old ones, a new city was forming in the air.... It seemed, finally, that this whole world with all its inhabitants, strong and weak, with all their domiciles, the shelters of the poor or gilded mansions, resembled at this twilight hour a fantastic, magic vision, a dream, which would in its turn vanish immediately and rise up as steam toward the dark-blue sky.’

Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Weak Heart, 1848

‘The apparition of these faces in the crowd: / Petals on a wet, black bough.’

Ezra Pound, In a Station of the Metro, 1913

Still from Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express, 1994

‘All that was good in me thrilled in my heart at that moment, all that I hoped for in the profound, obscure meaning of my existence. Here was the endlessly mute placidity of nature, indifferent to the great city; here was the desert beneath these streets, around these streets, waiting for the city to die, to cover it with timeless sand once more. There came over me a terrifying sense of understanding about the meaning and the pathetic destiny of men. The desert was always there, a patient white animal, waiting for men to die, for civilizations to flicker and pass into the darkness. Then men seemed brave to me, and I was proud to be numbered among them. All the evil of the world seemed not evil at all, but inevitable and good and part of that endless struggle to keep the desert down.’

John Fante, Ask the Dust, 1939

‘Earth has not any thing to show more fair: / Dull would he be of soul who could pass by / A sight so touching in its majesty: / This City now doth, like a garment, wear / The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, / Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie / Open unto the fields, and to the sky; / All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. / Never did sun more beautifully steep / In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill; / Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! / The river glideth at his own sweet will: / Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; / And all that mighty heart is lying still!’

William Wordsworth, Composed upon Westminster Bridge, 1802

‘A near horizon whose sharp jags / Cut brutally into a sky / Of leaden heaviness, and crags / Of houses lift their masonry / Ugly and foul, and chimneys lie / And snort, outlined against the gray / Of lowhung cloud. I hear the sigh / The goaded city gives, not day / Nor night can ease her heart, her anguished labours stay.’

Amy Lowell, Extract from New York at Night, 1912-1926

Georgia O'Keeffe, New York Street with Moon, 1925

‘I'm beginning to feel the drunkenness that this agitated, tumultuous life plunges you into. With such a multitude of objects passing before my eyes, I'm getting dizzy. Of all the things that strike me, there is none that holds my heart, yet all of them together disturb my feelings, so that I forget what I am and who I belong to.’

Jean Jacques Rousseau, The New Eloise, 1761

Edward Hopper, Approaching a City, 1946

‘What are you afraid of, mister, it won’t be so bad. You won’t die. Berlin’s a big place. Where thousands live, there’s room for one more.’

Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, 1929

‘Out for a walk, after a week in bed, / I find them tearing up part of my block / And, chilled through, dazed and lonely, join the dozen / In meek attitudes, watching a huge crane / Fumble luxuriously in the filth of years. / Her jaws dribble rubble. An old man / Laughs and curses in her brain, / Bringing to mind the close of The White Goddess. / As usual in New York, everything is torn down / Before you have had time to care for it. / Head bowed, at the shrine of noise, let me try to recall / What building stood here. Was there a building at all? / I have lived on this same street for a decade.’

James Merrill, Extract from An Urban Convalescence, 1962

‘It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.’

Charles Dickens, Hard Times, 1854

‘To be born on the street means to wander all your life, to be free. It means accident and incident, drama, movement. It means above all dream... In the street you learn what human beings really are; otherwise, or afterwards, you invent them.

What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.’

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 1934

Still from Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, 1929

‘Five races, five languages, a dozen creeds: five fleets turning through their greasy reflections behind the harbor bar. Turks with Jews, Arabs and Copts and Syrians with Armenians and Italians and Greeks. The shudders of monetary transactions ripple through them like wind in a wheat-field... this anarchy of flesh and fever, money-love and mysticism. Where on earth will you find such a mixture!’

Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet, 1957-1960

George Grosz, Metropolis, 1916 - 1917

‘This was the London of my childhood, of my moods and my awakenings: memories of Lambeth in the spring; of trivial incidents and things: of riding with mother on top of a horse-bus trying to touch lilac trees of the many coloured bus-tickets, orange, blue, pink and green, that bestrewed the pavement where the trams and buses stopped... of melancholy Sundays and pale-faced parents and children escorting toy windmills and coloured balloons over Westminster Bridge: and the maternal penny steamers that softly lowered their funnels as they glided under it.

From such trivia I believe my soul was born.’

Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography, 1964

"Sire [said Marco Polo to Kublai Khan], now I have told you about all the cities I know."

"There is still one of which you never speak."

Marco Polo bowed his head.

"Venice," the Khan said.

Marco smiled. "What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?"

The emperor did not turn a hair. "And yet I have never heard you mention that name."

And Polo said: "Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice."

"When I ask you about other cities, I want to hear about them. And about Venice, when I ask you about Venice..

"Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased," Polo said. "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little."

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1972

‘Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.’

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961

Lyonel Feininger, Manhattan I, 1940