Anniversary
Sep. 11th, 2005 03:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Tomorrow I will give a lecture on the first cities in history. Prehistory, really, since writing is invented a little later. Anyway, the thing that strikes me is how well cities endure: they shrink and grow, they're burned to the ground or flooded out, the inhabitants change their language and their habits, but once a city gets started it will last for millennia. Modernism may encourage us to see the city as unnatural, alienating, rootless, but history says otherwise; ancient history may be full of lost cities, but most of those cities were alive far longer than they were buried.
I am writing this in Halifax, which was pretty much leveled on December 6, 1917, by the largest man-made explosion before the atom bomb.
I am writing this in Halifax, which was pretty much leveled on December 6, 1917, by the largest man-made explosion before the atom bomb.