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The lure of downtown. In Adventures in Baby Sitting the hapless kids from a Chicago suburb are obliged to go with only their baby-sitter…downtown; the monstrous ziggurats of 'downtown' loom at the end of the Expressway as their car is haplessly sucked into hell.

Sinclair Lewis in Babbitt describes George Babbitt driving downtown; "across the belt of railroad tracks,…factories producing condensed milk, paper boxes, lighting fixtures, motor cars. Then the business centre, the thickening darting traffic, the crammed trolleys unloading, and high doorways of marble and polished granite."

A prescient hundred years before de Quincey was describing this 'thickening'; he begins, evocatively enough:

"I have felt the sublime expression of her enormous magnitude in one simple form...viz., in the vast droves of cattle...upon the great north roads, all with their heads directed to London". Wonderful! cattle, heads down walking dully en masse to be eaten in London! And later:

"Already at three stages distance (say, 40 miles from London), upon some of the greatest roads, the dim presentiment of some vast capital reaches you obscurely, and like a misgiving. This blind sympathy with a mighty but unseen object, some vast magnetic range of Alps, in your neighbourhood, continues to increase."

The centre, the mighty downtown, remains my major obsession. But another image intrigues me almost as much, probably as fanciful, as artificial a construct as the "centre". Look at the picture of Paris in the Tres Riches Heures (1416) or Lorenzetti's representation of Siena (c. 1340) or indeed any picture of a city up to the seventeenth century: the tightly clustered buildings of the medieval or Renaissance city held within the tight embrace of the city walls. Within the certainties of court, guild, church, the benefits, one hopes, of Good Government as conceived by Lorenzetti: without, beyond a few harboured and well husbanded acres of vineyard and strip farming, the uncertainty of countryside, the dark forests, the cry of wolves (evoked so alarmingly as late as the twentieth century by Jacques Brel in his song 'Les Loups entrent dans Paris.') This is, for me, a very vivid juxtaposition, city and country; I love the description in Zola's Ventre de Paris in which Florent, hitching a ride on a vegetable cart finds himself in Paris:

"Il y eut un arret, un bruit de grosses voix; c'etait la barrière, les douaniers sondaient les voitures. Puis Florent entra dans Paris, évanoui, les dents serrées, sur les carrottes."

   
 

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