Our tragic connections – the city lights
Bogdan Bogdanovic writes about the holy essence of the city having lived to witness the almost complete destruction of cities he loves – I have struggled with his essays from the start – his pendantic archi-speak has made me nuts and then at the very end, after he has brought me all around in circles of his definition of the city, he drops the last paragraph like a bomb on me that makes me cry in its familiarity. He writes:
Of course you must have a city and have pride in it if you are to carry it inside yourself, and there are cities that cannot be murdered as long as a single urban being survives in them and carries it everywhere.
Which is why – my dear, hungry, wounded, much esteemed and much tormented friends – I admire you so and am with you as much as I can be in my old age, I am with you in your troubled, sleepless nights. Defending the city is the only valid moral paradigm for the future. It is a light that even the most humanitarian of humans – as much understanding as they may have for the rift between nature and man and the plight of endangered flora and fauna – are as yet unable to see, unable to understand.