Archive | City Matters

Two quotes I didn’t know I needed until I encountered them in my reading marathon last weekend. They speak to my heart, which clamors for mending; they fuse its two sides with a resolution I could never achieve alone. This is one of the many reasons I read so copiously. I am always searching for blueprints undetectable in my regular life.

She knows that her name will find its way into his speculations. So will his. Because there are things you do for people you’ve known your whole life. You let them save you, you put them in your books, and you let each other begin again, clean.—Erika Swyler, The Book of Speculation

Daylight slants like a razor cutting the buildings in half. In the top half I see looking faces and it’s not easy to tell which are people, which the work of stonemasons. Below is shadow where any blasé thing takes place: clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the voices of sorrowful women. A city like this one make some dream tall and feel in on things. Hep. It’s the bright steel rocking above the shade that does it. When I look over strips of green grass lining the river, at church steeples and into the cream-and-copper halls of apartment buildings, I’m strong. Alone, yes, but top-notch and indestructible—like the City in 1926 when all the wars are over and there will never be another one. The people down there in the shadow are happy about that. At last, at last, everything’s ahead. The smart ones say so and people listening to them and reading what they write down agree: here comes the news. Look out. There goes the sad stuff. The bad stuff. The things-nobody-could-help stuff. The way everybody was then and there. Forget that. History is over, y’all, and everything’s ahead at last.–Toni Morrison, Jazz