Previous: Actuary & the seasons
“Homo animal querulum cupid suis incumbens miseriis.” [man is a querulous animal, always loving to brood over his miseries Reference] I wonder where that comes from... a dreary truth, well worded. At least, if was a truth for me during many a long year. Life, I fancy, would very often be insupportable, but for the luxury of self-compassion; in cases numberless, this it must be that saves from suicide. For some there is great relief in talking about their miseries, but such gossips lack the profound solace of misery nursed in silent brooding. Happily, the trick with me has never been retrospective; indeed, it was never, even with regard to instant suffering, a habit so deeply rooted as to become a mastering vice. I knew my own weakness when I yielded to it; I despised myself when it brought me comfort; I could laugh scornfully, even “cupide meis incumbens miseriis.” [couldn't find translation] And now, thanks be to the unknown power which rules us, my past has buried its dead. More than that; I can accept with sober cheerfulness the necessity of all I lived through. So it was to be; so it was. For this did nature shape me; with what purpose, I shall never know; but, in the sequence of things eternal, this was my place.
Could I have achieved so much philosophy if, as I ever feared, the closing years of my life had passed in helpless indigence? Should I not have sunk into lowest depths of querulous self-pity, grovelling there with eyes obstinately averted from the light above?
Alpha.
So he sees philosophy as the combination of deprivation followed by plenty, or else misery followed by contentment leads to philosophy. Maybe.
Beta.
The other day I noticed a street person, camped in the middle of the day in the doorway of what was once the De Beers store and will at some time in the future become the Dior store. This reminded me of a Jane Jacobs observation about how cities actually work -- as opposed to how people think they should work. She noticed, and I’m paraphrasing wildly here, that a city street is a sort of ecosystem and that any void will be filled by something or someone. The city government or the neighbors may have an idea of what they wish the street to look like, but if there is any kind of an opening, people will come in and take possession just as weeds will colonize bare ground.
Jacobs here describes the process by which a healthy neighborhood regulates itself:
Jacobs here describes the process by which a healthy neighborhood regulates itself:
Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
There is also a longer, but even more wonderful passage describing the intricate operation of a single urban block through various stages of the day. This in not an urban monoculture block, but one of complexity with many different economic and social functions all interlocked and, almost incidentally, supporting each other. Jacobs writes about cities the way Dillard writes about nature.
I found the rest of the Jacobs quote I was thinking of -- it continues from where the first one left off:
The stretch of Hudson Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet. I make my own first entrance into it a little after eight when I put out my garbage can, surely a prosaic occupation, but I enjoy my part, my little clang, as the droves of junior high school students walk by the center of the stage dropping candy wrapper. (How do they eat so much candy so early in the morning?)
While I sweep up the wrappers I watch the other rituals of the morning: Mr Halpert unlocking the laundry's handcart from its mooring to a cellar door, Joe Cornacchia's son-in-law stacking out the empty crates from the delicatessen, the barber bringing out his sidewalk folding chair, Mr. Goldstein arranging the coils of wire which proclaim the hardware store is open, the wife of the tenement's superintendent depositing her chunky three-year-old with a toy mandolin on the stoop, the vantage point from which he is learning the English his mother cannot speak. Now the primary children, heading for St. Luke's, dribble through to the south; the children from St. Veronica's cross, heading to the west, and the children from P.S 41, heading toward the east. Two new entrances are being made from the wings: well-dressed and even elegant women and men with brief cases emerge from doorways and side streets. Most of these are heading for the bus and subways, but some hover on the curbs, stopping taxis which have miraculously appeared at the right moment, for the taxis are part of a wider morning ritual: having dropped passengers from midtown in the downtown financial district, they are now bringing downtowners up toward midtown. Simultaneously, numbers of women in housedresses have emerged and as they crisscross with one another they pause for quick conversations that sound with laughter or joint indignation, never, it seems, anything in between. It is time for me to hurry to work too, and I exchange my ritual farewell with Mr. Lofaro, the short, thick bodied, white-aproned fruit man who stands outside his doorway a little up the street, his arms folded, his feet planted, looking solid as the earth itself. We nod; we each glance quickly up and down the street, then look back at each other and smile. We have done this many a morning for more than ten years, and we both know what it means: all is well.
The heart of the day ballet I seldom see, because part of the nature of it is that working people who live there, like me, are mostly gone, filling the roles of strangers on other sidewalks. But from days off, I know enough to know that it becomes more and more intricate. Longshoremen who are not working that day gather at the White Horse or the Ideal or the International for beer and conversation. The executives and business lunchers from the industries just to the west throng the Dorgene restaurant and the Lion's Head coffee house; meat market workers and communication scientists fill the bakery lunchroom. Character dancers come on, a strange old man with strings...
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
I once spent the better part of a day waiting, in vain, for a woman on a stoop of a street like this in Chelsea. The only detail I can add is the man, in some way disabled, who moved from place to place about the street pushing a bicycle as a less obvious form of a walker.
Recently I was reminded, again, of Jacobs and her study of the complexity of cities, when I started going to my gym, which is in the Financial District, several hours earlier than previously. Just after 8 am, as it happens. Ever since I moved here I have been fascinated by the variety of commuter paths into the city. There are a variety of trains, ferries, and three different bus operations, plus automobiles flowing in over two bridges and two freeways. Lately, the trickle of bicycles has turned into a torrent from the various neighborhoods outside downtown. But what I’ve noticed on my morning walks to the gym, is the flow of pedestrians from the thickly populated neighborhoods just to the west of downtown. Normally I see the near constant flow of tourists following the traditional tourist routes, but earlier in the morning there is a very different (in both appearance and direction) flow of workers coming to work. While it is an exaggeration, noticing this flow always reminds me of those lines from The Waste Land:
Recently I was reminded, again, of Jacobs and her study of the complexity of cities, when I started going to my gym, which is in the Financial District, several hours earlier than previously. Just after 8 am, as it happens. Ever since I moved here I have been fascinated by the variety of commuter paths into the city. There are a variety of trains, ferries, and three different bus operations, plus automobiles flowing in over two bridges and two freeways. Lately, the trickle of bicycles has turned into a torrent from the various neighborhoods outside downtown. But what I’ve noticed on my morning walks to the gym, is the flow of pedestrians from the thickly populated neighborhoods just to the west of downtown. Normally I see the near constant flow of tourists following the traditional tourist routes, but earlier in the morning there is a very different (in both appearance and direction) flow of workers coming to work. While it is an exaggeration, noticing this flow always reminds me of those lines from The Waste Land:
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
T.S. Eliot
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