Читать книгу A Day in the City - Mikko Soiniemi - Страница 5

Introduction

Dear Reader,

What you are holding in your hands right now is the portrait of a city, my city, your city, the city. The concept of the city has always fascinated me.

It seems to be the place where humans can be whatever they want to be, yet fail miserably at it. It is a place that is buzzing and humming with life and yet there are times when it looks like the deadest place on earth. What exactly is a city? It is a place in which many people have come together to live there, yet there is no place on this earth where you could be more alone than there. What fascinates writers about the city is not just only the fact that it is a place of contradictions, but also that it is so richly filled with stories. The more people there are the more stories need to be told.

So the book that you are holding is exactly that, it tries to be a picture of a place that has a million faces, something that eludes all description. The city can never be represented in one story. This book is a Panopticon, it is your way to look into the minds of people that make up the city they live in, it is your way of putting together fragments in order to grasp the city as it lives and breathes. Imagine yourself floating over the heads of people and randomly join them for a little while.

Something like the city cannot be portrayed, but in every story there is also a part of the place where it takes place. Places form people and people form places. So maybe the cities we have in this world tell us a little about how and who we are.