Читать книгу Walking Backwards - Mark Frutkin - Страница 6

Walking Backwards Through

Ten Cities Around the Globe

Tradition has it that the first city was founded by Cain, a murderer.

Throughout history, cities have been given a bad rap. Shelley said “Hell is a city much like London” and, at times, it’s hard to disagree with Jean-Jacques Rousseau who stated, “Cities are the abyss of the human species.” Still today, every city has its dark underside.

Yet cities are where civilization blossoms. Great cities are filled with great museums, concert halls, publishing houses, jazz cafés, and trend-setting restaurants. Tomorrow’s art is cooked up in a garret in Soho, a tenement in Osaka, or a bistro kitchen in Montreal. The next Ulysses is written in downtown Toronto, Shanghai, or Amsterdam. Artists of all sorts gravitate to cities to consort with their peers and be inspired. Cities are like Nietszche’s universal tree — if its branches reach into heaven, its roots must reach into hell.

Walking Backwards is a look back at ten cities (more or less) and what happened there, for a city, above all, is where things happen. The journey includes cities large and small, from Paris and Delhi to Alba and Boulder, and covers a time period of over forty years.