Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and mat...erial that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Despair, I don't like you very well.... You don't suit my clothes or my cigarettes. Why do you locate here as large as a tank, aiming at one half of a lifetime?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To a traveler from the Old World, Canada East may appear like a new country, and its inhabitants like colonists, but to me, coming... from New England and being a very green traveler withal,... it appeared as old as Normandy itself, and realized much that I had heard of Europe and the Middle Ages. Even the names of humble Canadian villages affected me as if they had been those of the renowned cities of antiquity. To be told by a habitan, when I asked the name of a village in sight, that it is St. Féreol or St. Anne, the Guardian Angel or the Holy Joseph's; or of a mountain, that it was Bélange or St. Hyacinthe! As soon as you leave the States, these saintly names begin ... and thenceforward, the names of mountains, and streams, and villages reel, if I may so speak, with the intoxication of poetry,--Chambly, Longueuil, Pointe aux Trembles, Bartholomy, etc., etc.; as if it needed only a little foreign accent, a few more liquids and vowels perchance in the language, to make us locate our ideals at once. I began to dream of Provence and the Troubadours, and of places and things which have no existence on the earth. They veiled the Indian and the primitive forest, and the woods towards Hudson's Bay were only as the forests of Germany. I could not at once bring myself to believe that the inhabitants who pronounced daily those beautiful and, to me, significant names lead as prosaic lives as we of New England. In short, the Canada which I saw was not merely a place for railroads to terminate in and for criminals to run to.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »