A city's worth.

On my bus ride every morning I am audience to a nickelodeon show of alternately fascinating and troubling scenes. I read the city as a dialect, an offspring of the complex language of industrial progress. I see it as a completely natural outcropping of men's dreams, however, still being a bit provincial, I also see it as totally unnecessary. But it is, and it is a feast for sensitive eyes. Where else is there so much oddity, so much contrary, so many delusions and truths? Well I suppose the answer to that would be "everywhere, even where man has built nothing". But one notion always is striking to me: that each day a city's worth of people passes on, while at the same time a city's worth is being born. This process of loss and replenishment, an ongoing exchange of souls, in motion every second. The frail line we imagine to be so strong that divides life from death is danced across daily. The living are born and wear the clothes and live in the houses of the dead. All the monuments we build to them are paltry compared with what they really leave us: the inertia of their experiments and mistakes. In Rome, any time they dig a new subway tunnel, ruined cities are revealed. Aren't we all perched on ruined cities?

These are the thoughts that are occupying my mind as I pass St. Patrick's Cathedral, the sky an indifferent blue overhead. Strands of clouds lay themselves softly across bare morning light. My day has hardly begun and I am already weighed down by thoughts. When I am out in the world these imaginings can be fixed to objects, whatever may cross my field of sense. But ah! there is the Great Hall, growing ever larger as we approach, a promise of resignation. Sometimes I wonder if I am only a dream conjured by that sleeping giant. But I live when I am away, do I not? How it shines on a clear morning, with a cruel glow. It could have been carved from a single stone, polished to perfect brightness. The activity of the city rushes about it, a million souls are passing through it at all times, and it remains unmoved. I step from the bus into the square that I have walked across lost in dreams over and over again. The strange pink building with gothic spires will be golden when I pass it from the opposite direction this evening. The cavalry man on his horse is forever lunging forward with his sword. The sculptures of the sailors on bronze plaques are trying to free themselves yet again today.

A friend wrote the other day: "The past is the past. Just like a bad dream." She is right, we are constantly reawakening from the nightmare, each moment driven by unseen energy, and the past vanishes under layers of these moments. But in the Great Hall there is another saying: "The past is prologue". It leads to something. We are thousands of living and dead souls reflected in a single body. These are my thoughts as I cross the threshold. I resign myself to another day of darkness and silence.