SUMMER 2009
their dead before they housed themselves.” Prehistoric nomads established permanent habitations of the dead, such as caverns, mounds, barrows, which were the chief settled landmarks and points of return, often also serving as shrines and sacred places with particular access to the spirit world. Only later did such men exchange their mobility for settled habitations, cities of the living built amid reminders of the dead. Which is why Mumford was right to proclaim that “The city of the dead antedates the city of the living” and is “the forerunner, almost the core, of every living city.”
E
ven today, when we think of our great cities as having even more dynamic, even frenzied, aspects that those that Mumford described in his epiphany, this profound cultural function of carrying forward the past is still very much present, undergirding all else. For all its constant hubbub and upheaval, a great city is much more likely to carry forward the material vestiges of the past, and the memories those vestiges hold, than is most any American suburb or small town. Permit me to draw on my own experience for confirmation of this. I grew up in a very pleasant and agreeable suburb of Baltimore, and would not have traded it for Mumford’s Manhattan. But I have to admit that my very earliest memories are of urban scenes: toddling across a busy Cincinnati intersection while clutching the hand of my big sister, or gawking at the glorious lobby of the Palmer House in Chicago, or my first glimpses of the Lincoln Memorial and the National Gallery in Washington, or of what is still the most majestic tall building in the world, the incomparable Empire State. These are all scenes that I can revisit and experience and enjoy today, along with the memories, both personal and collective, that flood back when I see them. (Even absences, such as the still-fresh absence in our minds of the Twin Towers in the New York skyline, are sources of memory in the great city.) But my beloved hometown, and even the house that I grew up in, have been transformed beyond recognition since I lived there. Which setting, one may ask, is more conducive to a sense of continuity, or faithfulness to the past? 15