Friday, December 31, 2010

AT NIGHT EVERYTHING BECOMES DIFFERENT

The cities of the world -- from my Chicago to your New York or London or Bombay or Cairo -- wear many different faces. But when you examine them, they really only come down to two: Day and Night.

In the daytime we and our cities wear very much the same face. The streets and boulevards and work places all melt together into a kind of impressionist painting. The subjects and features are a little blurred, and everything tends to blend into everything else. Sameness is splashed all over the canvass. Attacking the morning traffic, getting to the job, working the agenda, lunch break, traffic home -- it all pretty much gauzes together.

But at night, ahh, here's when and where we become different. When the different colors of us sharpen and become more distinguishable.

Notice how the universality of our 9-to-5 selves gives way to the particularity of our night-time selves. When we go forth into the great dark city to find our own particular oases of pleasure. Perhaps the local bowling alley. The neighborhood saloon. Or the cineplex. Or the theatre, Or a jazz club. Or a favorite long-talking-over-dinner restaurant. After the sun gives way to the moon, we seek out our own particular diversions and satisfactions.

The people who in the day time looked and sounded so very much the same -- in traffic, on the train, at the desk or derrick next you ours -- quite suddenly and perhaps surprisingly shed their sameness for their selves. They briefly drop their mask, open their heart, speak their feelings. Be they bowlers or artists, doers or dreamers, by golly, you never quite knew them before!

Want to travel the world...? Taste its many places and populations...?Travel your city at night...!

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for this uniquely cosmopolitan view Jack ... in this small village in the hinterland there is nothing to hear or see except the aurora and perhaps the faint wail of the coyotes. Truly "Civilization" is found in the great metropolises of this fragile planet ... still even given the allure of society we find that out here on the broad sweep of the west there is a charm in the quiet ... and an understanding of our need for community and shared commonality that is ‘fully’ appreciated … in depth.

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  2. Geezer, I am a deeply devoted fan of the primal, the natural, the countryside. Probably couldn't actually do well in it because of my urban background, but like so many urbanites I fancy life in the country to be what Rousseau wrote about and Norman Rockwell paints about and Andy Griffth's Mayberry is all about. It's this very mystique that Palin taps into (for ulterior motives methinks) when she describes the "real America"

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