"Psychogeographical zones" and "ambience" are necessary abstractions — or, not abstractions, but qualitative terms when the quantitative finally won't suffice. And there is a way within these ideas to understand the city as a not-unsubtle instrument of self-detection.
Ambling around a city which is specifically unfamiliar but filled with legibilities that thus feel familiar — a North American city for one who has spent years in North American cities — one can realize certain things measure of response to certain regions, neighborhoods, zones.
That is to say, when one comes to the neighborhood never-before-seen and feels at first an ease, a satisfaction...proceeding to the sense, the distant certainty that this is likely the place in which one would live if one lived in this pleasant city, one has discovered far less about the neighborhood than about oneself, about how one's tastes and pleasures and self-regards have become fixed.
Life is not on the side of the mute acceptance of this, alas.
Posted by jane at April 24, 2006 01:28 PM | TrackBack