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Unit 10
The Idiocy of Urban Life
Henry Fairlie
Between about 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. the life of the city is civil. Occasionally the lone footsteps of someone walking to or from work echo along the sidewalk. All work that
has to be done at those hours is useful - in bakeries, for example. Even the newspaper presses stop turning forests into lies. Now and then a car comes out of
the silence and cruises easily through the blinking traffic lights. The natural inhabitants of the city come out from damp basements and cellars. With their pink
ears and paws, sleek, well-groomed, their whiskers combed, rats are true city dwellers. Urban life, during the hours when they reign, is urbane.
These rats are social creatures, as you can tell if you look out on the city street during an insomniac night. But after 6 a.m., the two-legged, daytime creatures of the city begin to stir; and it is they, not the rats, who bring the rat race. You might think
that human beings congregate in large cities because they are gregarious. The opposite is true. Urban life today is aggressively individualistic and atomized. Cities
are not social places.
The lunacy of modern city life lies first in the fact that most city dwellers try to
live outside the city boundaries. So the two-legged creatures have created suburbs,
exurbs, and finally rururbs (rubs to some). Disdaining rural life, they try to
create
simulations
of
it.
No effort
is
spared
to let
city
dwellers
imagine
they are living
anywhere
but
in
a city:
patches
of
grass in
the
more
modest
suburbs,
broader
spreads in the richer ones further out; prim new trees planted along the streets; at
the foot of the larger backyards, a pretense to bosky woodlands.
4
The professional
people
buy
second homes
in
the
country
as soon as
they
can
afford them, and as early as possible on Friday head out of the city they have created.
The New York intellectuals and artists quaintly say they are
“ going to the country
”
for the weekend or the summer,
but
i
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