Cityscapes

and my observations become astute. The city around me becomes a womb nourishing my thoughts and crafting my words. No matter what topics appear in my writing, there are always traces that remain lingering in the background: the anonymity of the urban imaginative.

Our surroundings affect us. They are the palette on which we develop our lives, our beliefs, and our feelings. The great twentieth-­‐century Kabbalist Rav Ashlag explains that “just as the seed that is sown in the ground manifests its potential only through its environment,” that is, the quality of the soil, the amount of water or sunlight available, “once the individual has chosen his environment, he is subjected to it like clay in the hands of a potter.”

It is well known that people ascribe different cities with their own identities; our urban landscapes most certainly have their own unique way in which they are represented in culture, film, and writing. But what interested me for this project was how those identities are so often transplanted onto their inhabitants. And while dispute continues over terminology to define contemporary literature, there is an undeniable shared quality in how we write, publish, and take in literature in the internet era.

2