I’ve been writing a story about Chicago recently. It’s taking me places I never thought I’d see, and small pieces of the tale, like debris, are emerging one by one from a thick fog. It’s a very abstract process. As for the story itself, it’s really just a dusty, noisy mess, with images of honking traffic and a main character amidst it, lonely. I’m trying to add to this mix some notes of warmth, so we’ll see how that goes. That’s all for now.
Something else is that I’ve been rereading The Fountainhead this week (of which I believe I wrote a book review of atrocious length about a year ago that no one should be expected to read entirely through, my apologies), and it’s in a sense a paean to architecture. Maybe more about the ideal behind it than the physical growth of glass buildings, but the images of New York skyscrapers in the book are stunning; simplistic, but something within it that makes you stop for a moment and breathe, if you know what I mean.
Construction is currently ongoing all around our house. Orange wood barricade fences are set up. Dusty helmets gleam in the sunlight as the workers drill, and with the metallic bore noises, red trenches open in the soil. It’s just a neighborhood project. But Toronto rose in 1834, into the glamorous urban forest that it is today. Memphis, warm southern Memphis, first sprung into the scene in 1819 as a settlement near Mississippi River. My new friend Chicago had a humble beginning as a town in 1837.
Cities grow like that. Slow-growth, ever-reaching, undying. Enigmatic things, that contradict some law, as they’re filled with life but not living; and even as I write this, buildings around the world are rising higher, higher, reaching the sky a little bit at a time.
