beatnikside calls it "city love," and that’s a good name for it. It is not a term to be confused with a more general love of place. Country love, for example--and when I say "country," I’m speaking of wilderness, not of nations--is entirely different from city love. Country love comes from imagining the glaciers that carved out the canyon where you’re standing. Country love comes from awe of and affection for the few spots that have managed to remain untouched by the sphere of human endeavors. Country love comes from feeling small and liking it.

City love, on the other hand, is built on human endeavors. You might love the fact that you live in a city where the seasons are distinct, where there’s snow every winter and sun every summer. You might love the fact that you never have to scrape ice off the windshield of your car, or that you start eyeing your favorite sweaters every August and know you’ll be wearing them in September. These things don't mean nothing, but they also don't mean enough. Nobody loves a city just because they haven’t had to buy an umbrella in the last six years. To say otherwise would be like telling someone, upon being asked what you love about your partner, that he has "great eyes" or "amazing shoulders." These descriptors could match any number of people. They are the stuff of one-night stands, not of great affairs.

Years ago, I had a phone conversation with a friend who told me about a woman he had been seeing. "What is she like?" I asked him. "She’s like a butterfly," he answered rather rapturously, and I laughed. But then I realized he had told me more about how he saw her with that simple sentence than he might have said in ten minutes of conversation about what she does for a living, who she knows, or where she went to college.

And so I look for those moments. I look for the words that say just enough for me to know that many more things are being left unsaid. They aren’t always easy to find; people are typically most articulate when they’re talking or writing about themselves. This is why, I think, there are so many more songs about breakups than there are about happy relationships: breakup songs are almost never about the person with whom the songwriter has parted ways. They don’t tell the listener what someone was to the writer. And that’s often just fine, both because pain legitimizes a certain amount of self-indulgence, and because most of us can relate to the paradoxical desire to appeal for empathy while simultaneously declaring that we feel worse than anyone has ever felt.

I like many of those songs. But I like the butterflies, too. So I try to pay attention.

I found Mary McCarthy’s city love at the bottom of a fishbowl. McCarthy, an American novelist and journalist who died in 1989, lived in Venice for a time and wrote Venice Observed as both a tribute to the city and a record of her time there. In the book, she describes an apartment she rented and the pets left in the kitchen by the owner of the apartment: two anemic-looking goldfish in a china bowl.

In the bottom of the bowl is a pile of five- and ten-lire pieces. That is all--no greenery, no algae, no scum. The water is clear and still. The fish are extremely pale, almost white, as though their colour had been bled from them, and very lethargic in their movements, not to say torpid. When I first looked at the apartment, I noted the fish and supposed they would go upstairs with the family. But when I moved in, they were still there in the kitchen, and the signora, drawing one of her most apologetic faces, as though she were about to ask me for a loan of one million lire, inquired whether they were in my way, whether I should mind if they stayed there. I did not mind, I said, but she must tell me what to feed them. Nothing, declared the signora, with a droll, sidelong look; she delights in mystifications. 'Non capisco,' I had to admit. 'Niente, niente!' airily repeated the signora. They did not have to be fed; that was the principle of this aquarium. The coins generated some sort of chemical in the water, and the fish lived on that; she had copied the idea from a fountain in Milan. I expressed doubt. Those poor blanched creatures were dying. Certainly not, scoffed the signora; she had had them nearly two years and they were in excellent health. As a proof of this, she plunged her long forefinger with its red-painted nail into the water and tickled one fish’s tail; he feebly crept away from her touch. 'Ecco!' she said, opening her pocketbook and tossing a fresh coin into the bowl. It was a bank too, she pointed out: if I needed change for my breakfast rolls, I had only to borrow from the fish. And there was nothing to clean; between the fish and the lire, the water stayed fresh.

This, for McCarthy, is Venice: it is a place sustained by its own improbability. It is a wishing well that operates on the coins of people like the signora, "an utter realist who lives in a web of unreal schemes." It is a pale reflection of its past, a marvel despite--and perhaps because of--its languid tenacity.

And that, for me, is city love: a fascination with tangible visions, with the collective personality of an urban space and the energy that drives it. You don’t have to want to live in a city to love it, nor do you have to love everything about it. What’s required is depth of connection--the conviction that whether or not you are from a place, you are in some sense of it.

Next up -
Part II: A Sunflower for Jerry