The City of Dreams
If we could see it all, the wonder would never cease
The city is a dream.
Anytime I walk around my city, moving through neighborhoods, streetscapes, and parks, I begin to realize the extent of history that surrounds me. The near-infinite build-up of the years strikes me—a crumbling building or a tree lusciously stretching overhead—who built that structure or planted that tree? What hand guides as all in this infinite play of form and function?
Many of the people that built, that planted, that wandered amongst cities in their own times, have all become part of the dream of years gone past…
As Kahlil Gibran observed in his seminal work “The Prophet”, the city is built out of dreams.
We all are joined by the immensity of the past. Cities and culture exist as part of the inexorable momentum of time. Even the lost parts of the past have immeasurable effects on the reality of our lives; we can not take a step that has not been shaped by what has come before. The roads under our feet, the walls that surround us, and the foods, tools, and other innumerable things that were created and curated in years past can never be overstated.
And that’s not even to talk about the people who inhabit these cities with us.
Sometimes I lay awake, wondering about the lives of, say, the people that work at Barnes and Noble in New York City, or the residents of a barrio on the outskirts of Mexico City. The only result of this is an overwhelming feeling of smallness, of my constant inability to get even remotely close to comprehending it all.
The city is full of people, diverse souls with ideas and dreams and desires that decorate the city like contrails. The unknowable that surrounds us, the vast length of history that stands beneath our feet, beckons us to simplify. Because if we could see the “tides of that breath”, as Gibran puts it, “you would cease to see all else.”
Is it not your breath that has erected and hardened the structure of your bones?
And is it not a dream which none of you remember having dreamt, that builded your city and fashioned all there is in it?
Could you but see the tides of that breath you would cease to see all else,
And if you could hear the whispering of the dream you would hear no other sound.
All of us, moving through the city, are surprised to see what we’ve never noticed before. That shop or that restaurant, that building with the architectural design we admire, that somehow, until that moment, had eluded us. As our lives change, our world shifts around us. We see what informs our world, our perspective morphing as much as our thoughts, mood, and understanding of people and places does.
The city is as much in our mind as it is around us. We can only notice a small percentage of what appears before us, necessitating that we distill the innumerable forms into a digestible package, like a film that we are always subconsciously creating and viewing ourselves.
Every day you walk out of your house, you see a new city. Like Galileo describing Venice’s infinite variations in “Invisible Cities” by Italo Calvino, you see it as your mind encounters it, shaping its forms inside the tesseract of your consciousness.
The city is dream, one we are constantly building in the flow of time. When you walk out of your house today, what city will you see? What city will you help create?