Preface: In this post, I say many disparaging things about Los Angeles and many nice things about London. I reserve my right to speak badly of the city I belong to, and acknowledge that whatever I say negatively about Los Angeles here, I return threefold in my love for it. Londoners may or may not agree with my analysis of their city, since it is rather idealistic, and many of them are rather not. They too reserve their rights to hometown whinging, and I would never dare to deprive them. This piece is an intellectual response to an emotional quandary of the past week, and should be considered in that light. The LA sun will always shine brightly.
Dickens wrote of the echoing footsteps of the future bearing down on his protagonists in their quiet Soho refuge. Fear and anticipation of the tumultuous world to come haunted these characters in an almost spectral way. Walking through London today, I do not hear the footsteps of the future, but those of the past.
At night, leaning against a building which predates even the notion of my nation, as the city veers finally homeward and the quiet slowly grows, I can hear the faint sound of footsteps echoing through the otherwise sepulchral neighborhood. Footsteps. Not the sticky crackling sound of tires on the pavement, not the low hum of an engine, not a wailing siren. Footsteps: an unmediated sign of life.
A place that is promised and a place that simply is. I live in the promised land, or at least a promised land. Alta California, the Golden State, was a place of great wealth, a harbor against the bitter chill of the East and Midwest. Americans were supposed to find their salvation here. We were a material Zion. But places of great promise, when they fall short, create a base and bitter resentment. Too many Americans grudge California every one of its faults, because it doesn’t live up to the dreams of its founding legend. London, in what seems to me a stark and radical contrast, holds little pretense at all. Of course, on the surface, there are grandiose facades to which no people, whatever their history, could ever live up. But the actual substance of the city itself is frank, honest.
In a world focused on the future, in the promised state of the promised nation, what choice do we have but to yield to modernity? What choice do we have but to reject the old ways and embrace the new? What choice do we have but to encase our meager river in cement, but to again widen the freeways, but to strike the iron again and again? We built a city that contained the very soul of the American Future, and it is a devastatingly lonely place.
Here in London, I have seen what a city built for people (not corporations, not real estate trusts) can look like. I can walk ten minutes and see the convivial. I can see people laughing together, sitting under sycamore boughs. I can see a human richness foreign to the furthest dream of my sprawling valleys.
This kind of denseness perpetuates a literary mode of existence. A certain kind of writer may be tempted to think that in order to achieve greater verisimilitude, a kind of mimetic inaction need occur (or rather not occur). Life can seem plain and boring, and it can seem that nothing ever really happens to anyone. A writer would need to eschew a sequential plot with action and tension, in order to achieve that depressive sense of stasis. It is a misguided thought, of course. Great, terrible, awesome, sublime, dramatic things happen every day, worthy of those great Aristotelian words Hamartia, Anagnorisis, Peripeteia, Catharsis. It is the writer’s job to find the ones worth telling about. This was Charlie Kaufman’s thesis in his film Adaptation. I don’t think it’s any great accident that these were the feelings he struggled with after moving from New York to Los Angeles. It is a place with so many people, separated from each other so severely, that a kind of surreal despondency overcomes the reality of our human geography, and we turn on the one hand to frivolousness (our main export), and on the other hand to alternate mimetic strategies. The alienation of the west makes it the great home to the American sect of magical realism.
In a city so tightly packed, you are forced to live among, to exist facing outwards. To drive in a car, to frolic only in one’s own private lawns, to hide from passersby across vast stretches of road, is to conceal oneself subconsciously from the other members of the community. The writer’s advantage in a place like this, where the display of humanity is a public good, is not only to see and become inspired, but to be seen.
Reading A Tale of Two Cities, or any book, is primarily a solitary endeavor, but bookpacking these places, I have found, is everything but. Shrinking away from London feels like a futile exercise, and as a constant practice would require true sacrifice to maintain. At every moment I am thrust into the social spheres of this place. There is no option to look away and pretend that life does not continue around me: antithesis to the solipsist. In bookpacking, these feelings of immediate relation are magnified by the closeness of the historical relations of the novel. There is a constant sense of “so it was here” or “so it was like this”, when I see Soho Square or The Old Bailey. The veil of academic distance is removed in a profound way, and I am reminded why the academic studies of these works appeared in the first place: because they are so immediately and truthfully borne from the experience of these places. It is a dialogue, to read a book in its very setting. You get to ask the cobbles constant whys, and if you look closely, you find answers. There is no alienation there, even across a gap of two hundred years. The footsteps of the past still echo loudly here.
