Wednesday, May 20, 2009

urban excerpt


“Don’t you like cities?”
“I adore them. Cities are wonderful.”
“I’m always glad when I get out of one myself,” Loring declared.
“Why?”
It wasn’t a question you could answer right like that, with a reply that she evidently expected would be on the tip of his tongue or ready-made in his mind. Loring knew why he disliked cities but it was a thing that had to be explained, with reasons. This girl, lifting her extraordinary gray eyes above the two straws in her lemonade, confused him.
“They’re too artificial,” he stated.
“But what else could they be? Isn’t that the whole point of cities—the wonderful thing about them—that they are made and can be made?”
“Of course they’re wonderful achievements. But they lack beauty.”
“You think that they do?”
“Yes. I mean,” he fumbled—“you take a wheat field. Or a farm in one of those valleys we flew over today. Or take a lake in the woods with a stand of pine around it. There you’ve got real beauty.”
“you take the George Washington Bridge across the Hudson,” she said, “look at it in sunset. Take Rockefeller Center in moonlight, or look down on it from the Rainbow Room. Take the Grand Central Station. They’re beautiful. You’ve got real beauty in New York.”
“Yes, I suppose so, in a way, particularly the bridge. But so much of New York is unsightly.”
“Did you ever look closely at one of those farms you were speaking of? The detail isn’t so good there either. But I know what you mean. Some things about cities bother me too. When we were flying along this afternoon and would go over one, I kept thinking that the offices and apartment buildings looked like filing cases where people were neatly filed. And there is such a small place in each file for each person. Small and probably pretty dusty.” She almost sighed and said, “I suppose a lot of people are never filed correctly either. They get put in the wrong filing case and have to stay there. They get lost.”
Margaret Culkin Banning - A Week in New York (1940) p.32-33