Quintessential

London had always seemed to me to be the most prosaic of cities. Sturdy, pragmatic and not especially inclined to flights of fancy; not a city in which the imagination might be let loose, or in which dreamers dream of revolution or love, but neither is she a mathematical, abstract city. But I now increasingly come to think that London is nothing but a city of memory and desire, a thousand cities whose histories continue to exist side by side, sometimes overlapping and intersecting, at other times running parallel to one another.

There is the London that is loosely connected to the old villages that went up to make London Town-and one can still detect remnants of this in the commons and heaths. Then there are the larger historical narratives that are written on her, each leaving its indelible mark: Roman London, Medieval London, Tudor London, Victorian, Edwardian…then there is the city that has been shaped by politics and international events: war and financial speculation, the crusades. In addition to this the city is shaped by her geography-and especially the silver ribbon that runs through her heart: the Thames. But there is also a hidden city, an underground, submerged history and this includes all those interconnecting and lost rivers and tributaries: the Trent, the Walbrook…they are like reminders of archaic words whose sense we have long forgotten, ancient by-ways that signify a truth that remains out of sight.

The city shapes and is shaped by people’s desires and memories and some of these have, in turn, been shaped by other climates, other geographies: Jews and Bangladeshis, West Indians and now the latest wave of immigrants: Poles and Lithuanians, Albanians and Russians.

And then there is a London that is fractured, splintered , along class lines: not just an affluent west end and a working class east, but also within the east or the south areas that are are thriving, confident and brash and areas that are dilapidated, in slow decline… and one feels one could continue with these subdivisions right down to a single human heart.

It is hard to envisage a metaphor for a city that is constantly in the process of escaping all definitions, a city whose past never quite dies. Perhaps it is a periodic table with each part of the city just a permutation of the other. But perhaps it really is the tube map. In this case it is reality which produces the map. At first one imagines all the terminal stations and what lies beyond; then one thinks about all of those great white circles where so many of the other lines intersect. Are all of the places  on any one ‘line’ connected by some sort of mysterious idea so that, for example, places on the furthest southern and northern extremities on the northern line come to share the same history?

Yesterday the air was arid, still, the sunshine bright but somewhat tired, weak. Walking through a part of the tube system that I had never seen before I had the strange feeling that I was back in the 1970’s. There was something about the darkness of that passageway, its flickering light and quietness that made me think in such a way. There are other parts of the system that are futuristic (the Jubilee line) and still others that are decidedly 1950’s in their layout and ambiance. Could it be that the tube is really a series of worm-holes?

In the bus one could hear a cacophony of voices. As always, there is infinite pleasure to be derived in trying to match an accent, a word, to a particular place. London’s infinity is not her networks of communication but in the myriad languages that are spoken. I return to my book, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. It is impossible to read more than a few pages at a time. The words weigh heavily on me -not in an oppressive way but like a great lead box whose key is slowly being turned, an unlocking of secrets. And I find myself closing it but keeping my finger on the page so as not to completely let go of the connection with the words on the paper:

The shallowness of a life of sanity.