Happiness lies in the fulfilment of the spirit through the body. Thus humanity has already evolved from an animal life to one more civilised. There can be no complete return to nature, to nudism, desert-islandry: city life is the subtlest ingredient in the human climate. But we have gone wrong over the size of our cities and over the kind of life we lead in them; in the past the clods were the peasants, now the brute mass of ignorance is urban. The village idiot walks in Leicester Square.
To live according to nature we should pass a considerable time in cities, for they are the glory of human nature, but they should never contain more than two hundred thousand inhabitants; It is our artificial enslavement to the large city, too sprawling to leave, too enormous for human dignity, which is responsible for half our sickness and misery. Slums may well be breeding-grounds of crime, but middle-class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium. No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
Palinurus (Cyril Connolly) – The Unquiet Grave (1944)
Palinurus (Cyril Connolly) – The Unquiet Grave (1944)
6 comments:
"they just keep growing as if nobody knows how big is too big"
A few years ago someone commented that the growth plans for Cambridge implied that somebody thought England needed another Leicester.
I recently took my son to attend a boozy do in central Sheffield: it's awful. A couple of years ago the memsahib and I went to a concert in Leeds: it's the same. Sky-high brutalist "architecture" is everywhere and I imagine the working conditions parallel it.
Not all cities are horrible - Perugia was rather fine this month, and I've never had a problem with Venice (out of season, of course!).
dearieme - the official position appears to be that England needs several more Leicesters. Then a few more.
Jannie - I no longer have much personal experience of cities because I've avoided them for decades now. I don't think I've ever visited Sheffield, but I visited Leeds a few times for meetings and wondered why anyone ever went there.
Peter - maybe Perugia works as a city because it's well inside Connolly's population limit, although Venice isn't. My impression is that here in the UK we aren't very good at preserving the better aspects of our cities, particularly the architecture.
The Rulers of cities want keep increasing the area of their city just so they can once again tax the workers and retired who moved to the city's surrounding countryside and small towns to escape the chaos caused by the rulers of big cities. And of course being a ruler of a bigger city deserves bigger remuneration, perks and pension.
We well as an increased probability of becoming a member of Government. Onwards and upwards. EU, United Nations, an Ambassador even
Doonhamer - yes they do want to keep increasing their cities. During my life, Derby has gobbled up what were once villages and there is no sign of an end to it.
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