The static electricity created by a city, which feeds that tension particular to city life, is linked to a powerfully contrasting polarization: this polarization, fragile masterpiece created er many centuries, has become the target of the too well intentioned efforts of modern urbanism’s collective unconscious.Įven the forgotten parts of cities, the empty lots and the rough edges, have a purpose. I don’t think of the city as a town dotted by famous sites but populated by places where I like to be, either physically or mentally (feelings so strong that they tend to confuse the past with the present…įor Gracq, cities are natural organisms that are best left alone by planners.
Whoever travels back in memory to a city he has visited, either as a tourist or as a pilgrim of the arts, usually clings to some landmarks as clearly distinguishable from the mass of buildings as are lighthouses for a sailor approaching a port… In one image we look out into the bright daylight, in the other we peer past a seated man who appears to be reading into total darkness. (Isn’t the typography on the title page wonderful? )The book opens with two unremarkable, overexposed and slightly blurred photographs (the usual cues that “memory” is being invoked), each offering different views of the same set of columns and arches. It’s the kind of book that permits you to enter on any page or, as I did, reread a chapter without immediately realizing it. If the book has a structure, I didn’t find it and I didn’t really care. Ostensibly about cities and about Nantes in particular, a city where Gracq went to boarding school and returned later as an adult, The Shape of a City is really about memory – both the formation of memory and of memory as a form of history. Julien Gracq’s The Shape of a City is such a book. It’s the pleasure of the writing – the texture of the words, the way that ideas are interwoven – and I realize I don’t really care at all what the book is about but I just want to keep reading it, reading it. But as I pick the book up again I realize that something has compelled me to get as far as page 114 so perhaps I’ll just read a paragraph or two before consigning the book to the purgatory shelf. The arc of the text feels shapeless and I don’t remember what I read the day before, and so I am constantly tempted to put the book aside. Occasionally there comes a book that leaves very little trace of itself behind as I read it.
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