"When I lie on the floor and relax by listening to my breathing, I can hear the slower respirations of the city itself, a sound like the rumble of a surf: subway trains crowded with people who are teaching themselves how to be here."
Jonathan Franzen, 'First City' in How to Be Alone.
The city teaches us how to be, how to walk through its streets, run down train platforms, eat unfamiliar food until unfamiliarity becomes part of our familiar experience. We learn to feel at home even though we need an A-Z to find our friend's flat and Streetmap to get to a bar we never knew existed that's ten minutes walk from our front door. We live in blocks, hamster cages stacked up to the sky, our neighbours known not by name, but by irritation: the lady upstairs with the screaming baby, the family with the yapping dog, the girl who plays Xfm too loudly on Saturday mornings. We feed off the unfamiliar - it excites us to know there are infinite as yet undiscovered places within half-an-hour, yet the unfamiliar is not natural. By virtue of postmodern life we live in fear. We only buy latté from Starbucks, lest the feel of a strange cardboard cup disorientate. Lunch in a thousand cafés means a Prèt-a-Manger chicken and avocado wrap and a yoga bunny detox. I'm scared, not of the strange, or the new, but of a resignation, a subtle eroding of choice and experience that comes from living too long too fast too ugly in a city of lies.
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