Cities: meeting places of stories

How do you put a city into words? Synthesising the vastness, the complexity and the contradictory; conveying the multiplicity of voices as if they could ever be perceived as a single sound; showing one moment in the life of a place that stretches back into many histories…

I’ve been looking and listening out for words that capture a sense of place, and in particular cities.  Halfway through Eureka Street, Robert McLiam Wilson’s brilliant and powerful novel set in Belfast after the ceasefire, he pauses in his alternating character narratives to spend a chapter showing the reader his Belfast.  it is a place where ‘the streets smell stale and tired [...] Time seems passing and passed.  The city feels how it feels to grow old’ but where there is magic in the ghosts of whispered stories.  It is a city that can ’stick to your fingers like Sellotape’.  It becomes a living, breathing entity.  Over six pages McLiam Wilson manages to capture something of the life of this city, and perhaps something of the truth of all cities.  I wanted to share this:

Cities are simple things.  they are conglomerations of people.  Cities are complex things.  They are the geographical and emotional distillations of whole nations.  What makes a place a city has little to do with its size.  It has to do wth the speed at which its citizens walk, the cut of their clothes, the sound of their shouts.

But most of all cities are the meeting places of stories.  The men and women there are narratives, endlessley complex and intruiging.  The most humdrum of them constitutes a narrative that would defeat Tolstoy at his best and most voluminous [...] And in the end after generations and generations of the thousands and hundreds of thousands, the city itself begins to absorb narrative like a sponge, like paper absorbs ink.  The past and the present is written there.  The citizenry cannot fail to write there.  Their testimony is involuntary and complete.

I love the idea that a city expresses itself in the millions of stories that comprise it.  The vulgar, the violent, the moments of unexpected beauty.  I want to find this where I live.

Please suggest similarly brilliant evocations of city-ness!

A last word:

“In Belfast, in all cities, it is always present tense, and all the streets are Poetry Streets.”