I was in Manchester last week. Once, I knew the city well, but I haven’t visited in a few years; so the new skyscrapers on Deansgate seemed a sudden imposition into somewhere familiar. Like the Beetham Tower to their north, they are on a different scale to the low sprawl that surrounds them. They make no concessions to Manchester or humanity. They do not look like buildings. They look like the inscrutable geometric judgement of an alien god.
Thanks again ffatalism. I read recently from another thinker, that in civilisation culture becomes a museum. It mimics a living thing, but the culture is cut off from the cult from which its sacredness is communicated through symbol. As you write it is a lie and an inversion. Where I live in Swedish countryside I am reminded of this often, which can be painful. The museum breeds nostalgia too I think. And also, I agree that economic materialism is revealing reality as it is, it’s brutal like the skyscrapers. But you have geist in your writing, which I find very meaningful!
Jun 21, 2022·edited Jun 21, 2022Liked by FFatalism
Amen to this. I am writing this in a box canyon at 7600 ft up in Rocky Mountains. It is a beautiful place. All who come here remark on how peaceful it is. It is a kind of antidote to the sprawling suburbs.
But I am here only because the machine still hums along, even if it is sputtering a bit these days.
Hey brother, words well spelt. I sit here, flipside on the planet. On this day, we are other sides of the solstice and yet the story is the same. We don’t see it here in our skyskape but it is felt heavily as atmosphere. The mood. That sense. It has lingered long and, like truffle dogs, some raised a level of alert. Others, scurrying past the meadows, chose not to see.
So should we borrow a barrow and enter a furrow…
Collect back and start again. Reset (as a term) has become too abused. But the essence of collective, which sits outside the framework of words, is an option. Minds have a function but their rule has become oppressive. Perhaps, it is time to connect back to the heart.
Great essay. “They look like the inscrutable geometric judgement of an alien god.” I love this sentence, it’s perfect.
I used to love going shopping, even if I had no money to spend, just wandering around looking at all the shiny baubles, being part of the hustle and bustle, feeling connected to The World; then I grew up and realized it was all either empty show or part of a sneaky, gangrenous, people-eating monstrosity, and subsequently lost my taste for it. Unfortunately, most people these days don’t seem to be growing up, no matter how old they get. Do most of us stay children forever? Is that why so many of us are still blindly playing the game?
Christians can go too far with this, and wander into a Distributist's pietism.
Cities are like any place else on Earth. One may find God there. One may find individualistic maximizers ( Lord forgive me ) of their potential there. It is an article of faith with me that the architectural Establishment of the last one hundred years has done its best to annihilate any possibility of a sense of transcendence in us. The glass boxes may make one suicidal, but they also tend to produce nihilists.
Still, I find the temptation to anathemetize cities to be wrongheaded, though much less so than I'd have been likely to do fifty years ago. It's not the cities, but the neoliberal, postChristian zeitgeist which has made them the awful things they are which should be hated.
Ah, me, at 70, beset with memories, of department stores in which a man might spend forty years managing the hat department and support his family well on his paycheck; of a great opera company in which a woman started as a secretary and eventually became its artistic director.
Institutional memory, a dear and noble thing which hardly exists anymore.
Then there were the eccentrics, the small businessmen such as Howard Campbell, a stage magician for thirty years who retired to open Howard's Fun Shop, a crevice - in - the wall business in downtown Houston which especially on Saturdays was packed with guys from 8 to 80 who were eager to learn card tricks from the always affable Mr Campbell, and who could usually be counted on to spend a little money on supplies.
My last encounter with Mr Campbell was early in 1966, just before his death. A couple of weeks earlier, a local TV station had been doing "man in the street" interviews, the question being, "What is the purpose of Christmas?"
"It's about the birth of Christ," answered 13 year old me.
Howard Campbell had seen that segment on the local evening news broadcast. He smiled at me, and said, "You were the only one who got it right."
Yes, I think there is an innocent side to the thrill of the city too. The sheer delight in lots of encounters and the creativity. It feels like that side is on the decline as people are priced out of the centres - Manchester now seems worlds away from where it was a few decades ago - but it might just be that I'm getting old and crotchety!
No, the situation is certainly the same in the United States. I alluded to my having grown up in Houston. I did, in a large apartment with hardwood floors, in a building constructed with brick in 1940, owned by a widow who was interested not in making a financial killing, just a living. ( God bless you, Mrs Zora Kirkpatrick. )
We paid the same rent in 1976 as we had in 1959. I acknowledge the rarity of this even then. Now, such an apartment, "close in," geographically, to downtown Houston would cost us ten times what we paid during those seventeen years.
It really was possible for a man to support his family with the wife's staying home to be a housewife and mother. My mother did work part time after I was 12 and considered responsible enough not to set the place on fire with my occasional cigarette, not because we needed the money but because she enjoyed the work. My parents had no trouble in paying the tuition and living expenses for my education at the University of Texas, in Austin.
Yes, the romance of a city. It did exist. It doesn't now, for ours is the tawdriest of eras, and tawdriness and genuine romance can't coexist.
I don't marvel at the despair in so many people. As Christians, we know that ugliness in one's surroundings can't defeat the Holy Spirit, but if I and so many other Christians are driven into misery of soul by our assaultive architecture ( your photo illustration was hideous and perfect ), how could the spiritually unmoored not be bothered by it? It is alienating, the opposite of welcoming. It's as if it were announcing, "No soul can thrive here."
Thanks for sharing. I think you've identified a crux there: the cities have always had problems and cruelties; but they now seem to exclude the human altogether.
I was smiling inwardly when I read "cities lie" but then was taken aback and exposed to read the countryside lies - but it is oh so true.
Now I am thinking what does a landscape of truth look like? It is probably somewhere marginal or traditional (in the sense of indigenously managed) - but even there lies are present I am sure.
Thanks again ffatalism. I read recently from another thinker, that in civilisation culture becomes a museum. It mimics a living thing, but the culture is cut off from the cult from which its sacredness is communicated through symbol. As you write it is a lie and an inversion. Where I live in Swedish countryside I am reminded of this often, which can be painful. The museum breeds nostalgia too I think. And also, I agree that economic materialism is revealing reality as it is, it’s brutal like the skyscrapers. But you have geist in your writing, which I find very meaningful!
Amen to this. I am writing this in a box canyon at 7600 ft up in Rocky Mountains. It is a beautiful place. All who come here remark on how peaceful it is. It is a kind of antidote to the sprawling suburbs.
But I am here only because the machine still hums along, even if it is sputtering a bit these days.
It too is a lie.
Hey brother, words well spelt. I sit here, flipside on the planet. On this day, we are other sides of the solstice and yet the story is the same. We don’t see it here in our skyskape but it is felt heavily as atmosphere. The mood. That sense. It has lingered long and, like truffle dogs, some raised a level of alert. Others, scurrying past the meadows, chose not to see.
So should we borrow a barrow and enter a furrow…
Collect back and start again. Reset (as a term) has become too abused. But the essence of collective, which sits outside the framework of words, is an option. Minds have a function but their rule has become oppressive. Perhaps, it is time to connect back to the heart.
Great essay. “They look like the inscrutable geometric judgement of an alien god.” I love this sentence, it’s perfect.
I used to love going shopping, even if I had no money to spend, just wandering around looking at all the shiny baubles, being part of the hustle and bustle, feeling connected to The World; then I grew up and realized it was all either empty show or part of a sneaky, gangrenous, people-eating monstrosity, and subsequently lost my taste for it. Unfortunately, most people these days don’t seem to be growing up, no matter how old they get. Do most of us stay children forever? Is that why so many of us are still blindly playing the game?
Christians can go too far with this, and wander into a Distributist's pietism.
Cities are like any place else on Earth. One may find God there. One may find individualistic maximizers ( Lord forgive me ) of their potential there. It is an article of faith with me that the architectural Establishment of the last one hundred years has done its best to annihilate any possibility of a sense of transcendence in us. The glass boxes may make one suicidal, but they also tend to produce nihilists.
Still, I find the temptation to anathemetize cities to be wrongheaded, though much less so than I'd have been likely to do fifty years ago. It's not the cities, but the neoliberal, postChristian zeitgeist which has made them the awful things they are which should be hated.
Ah, me, at 70, beset with memories, of department stores in which a man might spend forty years managing the hat department and support his family well on his paycheck; of a great opera company in which a woman started as a secretary and eventually became its artistic director.
Institutional memory, a dear and noble thing which hardly exists anymore.
Then there were the eccentrics, the small businessmen such as Howard Campbell, a stage magician for thirty years who retired to open Howard's Fun Shop, a crevice - in - the wall business in downtown Houston which especially on Saturdays was packed with guys from 8 to 80 who were eager to learn card tricks from the always affable Mr Campbell, and who could usually be counted on to spend a little money on supplies.
My last encounter with Mr Campbell was early in 1966, just before his death. A couple of weeks earlier, a local TV station had been doing "man in the street" interviews, the question being, "What is the purpose of Christmas?"
"It's about the birth of Christ," answered 13 year old me.
Howard Campbell had seen that segment on the local evening news broadcast. He smiled at me, and said, "You were the only one who got it right."
Yes, I think there is an innocent side to the thrill of the city too. The sheer delight in lots of encounters and the creativity. It feels like that side is on the decline as people are priced out of the centres - Manchester now seems worlds away from where it was a few decades ago - but it might just be that I'm getting old and crotchety!
No, the situation is certainly the same in the United States. I alluded to my having grown up in Houston. I did, in a large apartment with hardwood floors, in a building constructed with brick in 1940, owned by a widow who was interested not in making a financial killing, just a living. ( God bless you, Mrs Zora Kirkpatrick. )
We paid the same rent in 1976 as we had in 1959. I acknowledge the rarity of this even then. Now, such an apartment, "close in," geographically, to downtown Houston would cost us ten times what we paid during those seventeen years.
It really was possible for a man to support his family with the wife's staying home to be a housewife and mother. My mother did work part time after I was 12 and considered responsible enough not to set the place on fire with my occasional cigarette, not because we needed the money but because she enjoyed the work. My parents had no trouble in paying the tuition and living expenses for my education at the University of Texas, in Austin.
Yes, the romance of a city. It did exist. It doesn't now, for ours is the tawdriest of eras, and tawdriness and genuine romance can't coexist.
I don't marvel at the despair in so many people. As Christians, we know that ugliness in one's surroundings can't defeat the Holy Spirit, but if I and so many other Christians are driven into misery of soul by our assaultive architecture ( your photo illustration was hideous and perfect ), how could the spiritually unmoored not be bothered by it? It is alienating, the opposite of welcoming. It's as if it were announcing, "No soul can thrive here."
Thanks for sharing. I think you've identified a crux there: the cities have always had problems and cruelties; but they now seem to exclude the human altogether.
You have certainly identified its basis: the exclusion of the human.
Good work this. I think another honest aspect of the city are its bins. They're like the clogged arteries.
Wow!
Cuts to the core FC&F.
Love this.
This is great writing.
Superb.
I was smiling inwardly when I read "cities lie" but then was taken aback and exposed to read the countryside lies - but it is oh so true.
Now I am thinking what does a landscape of truth look like? It is probably somewhere marginal or traditional (in the sense of indigenously managed) - but even there lies are present I am sure.