Writing about cities

Pero ha llegado la noche. Es la hora extraña y dudosa en que se cie rran las corti -nas del cielo, en que se alumbran las ciudades

Contempla los paisajes de la gran ciudad, paisajes de piedras acariciadas por la bruma o golpeadas por la violencia del sol. Disfruta de los bellos carruajes, de los fieros caballos, de la limpieza deslumbrante de los bo tones, de la destreza de los lacayos, de los andares de las mujeres ondu lantes, de

un espejo tan inmenso como la multitud; a un caleidoscopio dotado de consciencia, que, a cada uno de sus movimientos, repre -senta la vida múltiple y la gracia moviente de todos los elementos de la vida

Estar fuera de casa, y sentirse, sin embargo, en casa en todas partes; ver el mundo, ser el centro del mun do y permanecer oculto al mundo, tales son algunos de los menores placeres de esos espíritus indepen -dientes, apasionados, imparciales, que la lengua sólo puede definir torpemente.

His curiosity towards strangers he meets is guided by twin questions that have followed him to every city: “What is it like to be born here, I wondered, and what it is like to die here?

o read Of Cities & Women is to wander through a city in search of an “open space, a privileged place where the free line of the horizon creates a pure pleasure.”

cities give us maps to examine our lives

The city in the waning of winter, the city on weeks where the sun doesn’t skip a day, the city on afternoons bathed in islands of buttermilk light, the city on the night the sky was a riotous pink, the city of Matisse and Chagall who captured its luminosity, the city of lengthening shadows that form filigrees, the city by the sea held in eternal bl... See more

Communion assumes a different shape from community when you are unmoored from the land that birthed and assembled you, when you don’t believe in the nation as a constellation of imagined communities, when the restless wanderer in you knows that home is always elsewhere.