#on cities

A CITY, LIKE A LANGUAGE, is a living record of all that made it; generations of human constructions and innovations that together create a public space that knits us together in shared codes. Both revolve around formal historical centers but are animated and refreshed by peripheral slang undergrounds of experimentation. They swell and shift as waves of migration bring in new words, changing neighborhoods. Cities, like languages, are constantly evolving: slang can be as transient as an architectural flourish, or can become permanent—a new standard; accents and aesthetics shift slowly and irreversibly, and though the rate of change is imperceptible, you know it’s happening. Cities and languages are built collectively and become the place where we exist together. Neither has any meaning without other people, yet we each have our own, unique, literacy. We read each in our own way. The pleasure of knowing a hidden spot in a city is the same as choosing the perfect word for the moment.

You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavour to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people. One might think this state was antithetical to urban living, to the massed presence of other human beings, and yet mere physical proximity is not enough to dispel a sense of internal isolation. It’s possible – easy, even – to feel desolate and unfrequented in oneself while living cheek by jowl with others. Cities can be lonely places, and in admitting this we see that loneliness doesn’t necessarily require physical solitude, but rather an absence or paucity of connection, closeness, kinship: an inability, for one reason or another, to find as much intimacy as is desired. Unhappy, as the dictionary has it, as a result of being without the companionship of others. Hardly any wonder, then, that it can reach its apotheosis in a crowd