On Cities

This is the paradox of life in a modern American city: that the vast swathes of humanity pressing against us on the avenues and in the subways teach us new ways to be alone.  In the hyper-saturation unique to this urban milieu, we relearn aloneness as something to achieve – the idealized state of being we regretfully disengage with at the beginning of each day when we trade the comfort and perceived privacy of apartments for the cold stares of the morning commute.

I was compelled to take up residence in my inner city neighborhood by a variety of practical factors, though none of these carried more authority than the remote promise of an existential, even historical connectedness to other people.  I had not met any of these people, but that was no matter; I could imagine in acute detail the conversations about Kafka I would strike up with pretty girls on the bus, the private art museum exhibitions I would attend on Friday evenings, the hard-to-understand cab drivers I would befriend on late-night rides home.  A product of the suburbs, I mostly lamented my childhood and teenage years for the inspirational paucity their locales afforded me.  Convinced that nothing truly interesting – that is to say, nothing literary – could possibly occur amidst the tract homes and impeccably landscaped yards, I developed well-tuned internal mechanisms of projection to infuse my young life with a sense of world-historical purpose.  To overcome the handicaps forced upon me by the bland and too-familiar neighborhoods in which I came of age, I learned to pretend that I was not of them. I came to see the city as a welcome contrast to the cramped quarters of suburbia's wide open spaces, and then as the dynamic backdrop to my daring future exploits, a place onto which streets my internal aspirations could be mapped and, finally, realized in the flickering lights of downtown during rush hour. 

Even in a century defined by the extreme interpersonal connectivity allowed by the web and our mobile devices, cities maintain a distinctive allure as places of sublime contact.  Technology, for all its awesome magnitude, cannot adequately satiate the instinctive desire in many of us to submit to a something beyond what our minds can easily grasp.  What separates the city, in terms of social potentiality, from online networks such as Facebook or even its own projections via Google’s Streetview is the physicality of our relationship to it. As immeasurably vast as we know the internet to be, we navigate its depths primarily in two dimensions; its experiential sublimity suffers from its confinement to the screen.  The city, conversely, is something that envelops us when we venture out into it.  This is a result not so much of its crowds, which one can brush past and ignore with only some care, but of its architecture – an unavoidable fact which commands our attention and, in moments of heightened perceptivity, our awe.

In the weeks following my move here, I was struck by how quickly and how naturally I accepted my aloneness in the crowd.  At first my heart would break six times a day, one for each cute girl I saw with headphones plugged in on the train heading in the opposite direction, away from conversations over coffee and matinee movies, away from the potentiality which drew me to the city in the first place.  That potentiality has dissolved, and yet I am still here.  I joke about those missed connections now with friends, none of whom I met on trains.  I look out my window on a clear night (almost morning, now) at the Willis Tower and its surrounding structures and I know that these are part of what has kept me here, in the absence of so much human contact.  I am developing a relationship with the buildings here.

  Though it generally aspires to permanence and solidity, architecture is in fact a kind of performance art.  It is a performance of one historical instant, now long gone, but also of many others.  I am engaging with this performance now, each day I walk out the door of my converted Czech community center apartment building and past the neo-Gothic church on 18^th to wash my clothes at the decrepit lavanderia with light-up neon bubbles in the window.  I am realizing that the most meaningful relationships I have so far established in Chicago are with mostly inanimate objects and structures, and I am realizing the almost embarrassing intimacy of a hand-written letter from a friend in Virginia.  Intimacy. It’s more than one bargains for, living in a city.  And less. 

- C.T.