Thoughts On Signing Another Year's Lease

Cities!  It’s so hard to love them.  They have a way of ignoring those you most want to impress; just when your parents are visiting, or, say, your best friend from high school, there are absolutely no events of any cultural merit going on, the Common feels like nothing more than a heap of cigarettes butts, overmown weeds, and pigeons, and Central Square looks even more garish than usual.  The feeling of glamour that ought to be in the air seems a joke.  “What, you came here to feel cosmopolitan?”

In my subconscious, I think I assume there is some thriving, unknown substructure to cities; that they thrum with an unknowable, only occasionally perceptible beat, of concerts that are cooler than the ones I go to, clubs that never close, people who have fascinating conversations and frequent museums and various community events and are responsible for the murals on the sides of supermarkets.  I am not directly partaking in this substructure, or I do only occasionally, but I believe it to be there, and my faith in that cooler, more cosmopolitan and amazing elsewhere is an animating belief, a sustaining fiction that keeps me believing that the dirtiness, the ugliness is worth it.  But what if that isn’t so?  Perhaps all there is to the city is what we see on the surface: harried people disappearing anonymously into their small homes; empty paper coffee cups wheeling heedlessly down the street; endless iterations of Urban Outfitters.

I am, perhaps, conflating cities here, for Boston, I have to admit, is so strikingly beautiful, in so many surprising places; my bike route to work, for instance, is just stunning.  And New York, where I was this past weekend, is so often so terribly ugly, but, hello, is New York, so my parents and my best friend from high school would be impressed.  And, yes, is also so arrestingly lovely, in so many parts.

But still!  Don’t tell me you don’t ever stare, hopelessly, at a hideous tangle of on-ramps and off-ramps, or the brick wasteland around City Hall, or at stacks after stacks of office buildings and wonder if you’re right about it.  If it hums with culture, or is just what it looks like, and is nothing more.

Our summer subletter, Alyssa, would sometimes wish aloud that we could walk down the street on a summer night and, like the Pied Piper, draw the young people, who maybe weren’t doing anything right then but cooking spaghetti or watching “Grey’s Anatomy,” out to follow us.  And we’d meet them and befriend them and – perfect!

And why not?  Isn’t that the point?  Why just disappear behind our closed doors?

It is slow, it is dogged, it takes years.  There are few shortcuts, to knowing and coming to love cities, at least the cities I’ve loved.  Even the most godforsaken parts of Baltimore are beautiful to me; or, rather, ugliness and beauty have nothing to do with it, my mind learned them as simply home, and that’s that.  And so I feel, slightly, about my life here.  For one’s patience can be rewarded so thoroughly, and, anyway, patience costs so little.

p.s. Thanks, Chloë, for the kick in the pants.

Comments

[chloe]

Al fin bixi speaks. Having had similar experiences in falling in love with what seem like ugly parts of cities, I have faith that the same will happen here in Lima. So far Lima seems oversized, dirty, and loud. The more I feel at home with my life and work here though, the more I am seeing the Lima that most limeños love. I'll let you know when I notice my feelings about metropolitan Lima change--either for the better or worse. Finding the substructure, or at least finding a niche of Lima that grabs my attention, will probably be the necessary key.

[megan]

Ah, cities, how true, how apt. I find myself thrust into autumn in Korea, and everything seems a foreign-familiar adaptation of Boston. Perhaps, we are doomed to always link new places to old... and in some cases, have a major fear of commitment in settling in either?

PS. Just thought I'd throw in a comment, since I've been catching up on the lives of the catgut collective.