On the move.
(more…)Tag: city
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Barcelona, City of Metaphors
Arc de Triomf, Barcelona. I didn’t know what to expect of Barcelona before I arrived. All I knew was that it’s Spain’s second largest city; that it lies somewhere on the western edge of the Mediterranean; that its residents mostly speak Catalan; and that it’s home to one of the world’s most successful football clubs (which is, of course, mès que un club). Granted, this is probably more background info than I would’ve needed to explore the city regardless.
Now that we’ve been here for two days, though, I realize that everything we’ve seen—well, almost everything—resembles someplace else I’ve been. Like the train ride here from Madrid, I keep experiencing déjà vu, seeing sights and features in Barcelona that look as though they’d been transplanted from another of my travels. The Arc de Triomf? You know it’s spelled with a -phe, right? The Passeig de Gràcia? Isn’t that Catalan for “Champs Elysées?” That beautiful wrought balcony—haven’t I seen it in Brussels before…
And on it goes, with almost every passing moment, until I start to wonder: what if Barcelona were a city of mirrors? Or better yet: what if it were a city of metaphors—a record of reminders where I’ve been, a sprawling repository of familiar sights in new settings?
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The Imperial City
Statue of King Charles III of Spain (r. 1759-88) at the Puerta del Sol, Madrid. The imperial city, believing itself to be the center of a flat world, has no need for compasses or regular street grids.
Born at the crossroads of national myth and natural earth, it lurches in all directions like a lethargic lion, answering only to the orders of the sun (from which it derives its sense of time) and the promise of fresh prey from afar (from which it derives its sense of space).
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The City
The Lower Manhattan skyline as seen from Hoboken, NJ. For Mom and Dad, and for the city we love best.
How do you—how does anyone—come to know New York, let alone write about it?
I’d never asked myself this question until now, if only because I never felt I had to. Even as a native of “the city”—which, for the uninitiated, always refers to New York when uttered from anywhere within a roughly seventy-five-mile radius from the Empire State Building—I wouldn’t even know where to start. In fact, as someone who’s long spent most of his life in New Jersey, the state next door, I’ve inevitably lost much of the local ‘expertise’ that New Yorkers unabashedly pride themselves on.
For these reasons and others, I’d much prefer to leave the task of explaining the city to others who, “native” or not, have done it far more adroitly than I ever could. (One of the most compelling of these has only recently left our lives, and all too soon.) What I do want to understand more clearly, meanwhile, is the indispensable role that the city plays in my life story: not just in my earliest years or newfound present, but also in the ways I learned to navigate life in Ghent (a city which, for the record, I’d never confuse with New York despite its magical charms; even Brussels, for all its international character, sprawling beauty, and similar precarity, inevitably falls short). And that role, I’ve also come to see, could never be understood without looking back to the experiences of my parents when they first arrived in America via the city, decades before I left it.
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Between Two Rivers 