Eyes on Final Fantasy Forums > General > Writer's Corner > [S] Cities

[I'm my own MILF]

I had the idea to write something like this a little while ago and was bouncing it around in my head for awhile. I made a couple of abortive attempts at writing it but when I gave it a shot today, it seemed to come together in a way I'm fairly happy with.

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I was born with the first city. Ten thousand years ago, at a confluence of rivers in Eastern Europe, a few hundreds found they no longer needed to roam the plains and dales to sustain themselves. I was the first birth of those permanently settled and I was chosen by the universe to love cities. That first settlement never grew beyond two thousand people. Only the unique location allowed those primitive crops and thin livestock to suffice, and not for long. Raiders came as the ice receded and the city was crushed. None had a clue of how to defend such a place. With my last breaths I saw fire breaking the wood and stone hut that was the chief's, and fell into dreamless unconsciousness.

I awoke intermittently, wandering around the countryside, falling into unconsciousness again after days or decades, until a final collapse in a place I did not know.

I awoke a thousand years later in a new city, drowning in an oasis. Pulled to safety I found I knew the language and knew, suddenly, my purpose. I had lived far longer than anyone else in the old city on the Danube and wondered long, with successive priests and auguries, about my purpose. I had meditated on it as I wandered in loneliness around the It became clear to me in that moment as I stood and, naked, looked around the abode buildings growing all around me. Already this new city had surpassed the old in size, and though this would fall in time and erode to dust, I would never be without a city again.

I watched and learned as the people found new ways to keep their settlement safe. Walls were constructed all around, a hallmark of cities which would endure for nearly nine millennia, and a comfort to me. I watched and learned as the cities began to grow and began to meet their unique challenges. Water supplies, sewage, policing, healthcare, food supplies; it all had to be approached in a new way. As my experience grew I began to help develop cities, I advised kings and chieftains. I saw cities burn, pillaged and looted, and felt pain like no other. But now there was always some new city growing somewhere else, and though I had to endure the interminable countryside I found, at the end of all my journeys, cities larger and grander than any before. I traveled throughout the Levant, throughout the Mediterranean, along the Silk Road to the cities of Asia and at every point I found a larger, richer city, with grander buildings.

Nothing could have prepared me for the growth of the modern era. The cities of the Renaissance were vast, and I lived in Italy's cities of art and culture for a century. As the Industrial Revolution arrived and I returned to the Old World from the growing cities of the New, cities grew huge and cramped and were still so beautiful and even in the dirt and poverty they were a thousand times more alive and delightful than anything before. And then came the 20th century. And despite war and plague and poverty, despite the paranoia of two power blocs which might level every city on the planet, they grew to such magnificence.

I was born in a city of a few hundred. For the first two hundred years of my life I never lived anywhere with a population higher than two thousand. Can you grasp this, when more people than that can live in a single city block? When there are cities whose populations number in tens of millions, can you grasp a city which is dark, which sleeps? When a city of one hundred thousand barely qualifies for the title?

I feel the pulse of a thousand cities, all across the world. The conduits of life, thumping with a billion footsteps, surrounded by buildings which are ever-grander. The scintillating colors seen from a high hotel room, the suffused white-yellow-orange-red palette that was a city at night, interspersed by the occasional blue or green or another, rarer color. When I put my foot on the pavement of a city, I can feel it in its entirety. Every footfall in the city is mine to feel. The gurgling of water through pipes, the rumbling engines of commerce and transportation. The sly hum of a monorail, the sound of metal scraping against air, from very far away. I can feel the steady thrum of electricity as it courses helter-skelter through miles of power cable more surely than I can feel the blood in my own veins. The noise of telecommunications, through the air, through the ground, through cables, bounced off satellites in space. A city is alive and noisy and moving and there is no horrible stillness. I have been in the countryside and I know and hate it. The smell of construction and life and engines, or the smell of endless fields of quiet and still crops? The countryside is needed, but it is a necessary evil, it is hateful to me, a dead place, an old place. But Berlin! Vienna! Prague! Moscow! Seattle! How many cities I could list, how many nuances and differences, unified under the single and universal banner: City. The truest symbol of human civilization. A city necessitates tolerance, it demands advancement, it spurs the creation of art and science.

I told you that I discovered, in that second city, what my purpose is. Can you guess? If you had been the very first birth in the very first city, and had lived to live in every city since, as trader, architect, poet, the cook in a greasy spoon diner, the mayor, and had found you could not sleep as long as there was a street somewhere to walk down and see the lights and signs of, could not rest while there remained some city block you had not explored? What could you surmise as your purpose?

I exist to love cities.

[turkeyberry]

This made dan happy in his pants and he wasn't even polite enough to encourage activity in your thread!

It's lovely. I feel more caught up in the end than in the beginning. The end is super tongue burn hooo~

[I'm my own MILF]

Yeah I want to rework the first part but I'm not entirely sure how to. It feels like it needs to stay really short so I can't go adding much but I do want it to be punchier.

[Jiro]

I really like the way you write. I've never actually lived in a city, but you communicated that image to me quite well. Yeah, well done and thanks for the good read

[Vice Nebulosa]

I like it, mate.

I feel as if I have stated the gist of my paradigm regarding large-scale human congregation and activity elsewhere (or at any rate am too lazy to articulate them in full at the moment <_<), so suffice it for now to say that my basic philosophy on the subject of cities is not aligned with yours in any but the most superficial of ways -- have long loathed the things, though I am presently becoming acclimatized. There are obviously other perspectives to be had on human "progress", and the finer aspects of managing homos sapiens and their waste. That said, you have composed a genuinely effective bit of writing in that the perspective of your narrator is immersive, and I actually beheld some amount of the grandeur he describes in the passage. By the conclusion, I did not necessarily agree with him, but it is difficult to disregard his obvious ardor.

You seem to have a decisive talent for imagery, and I support this with a pair of examples: the unconventional reference to the monorail's friction with the air, and the straightforward description of a color scheme from a high altitude. Both grant energy and power to a scene that could, from another writer, be described as decaying and aimless.

Hard to say why, since I have not read the woman's work in forever and a day, but something about the writing (its zealous praise of human ability, hatred of traditional lifestyles, and the style of the imagery itself) invokes a bit of Ayn Rand -- potentially a positive or a negative, as my affinity for her work is not total, but I suspect the former in this case. By no means an obvious invocation, mind; just an interesting similarity.

[Rye]

Apparently, I've not commented on this, when I had meant to. Sorry bbcaekz.

Anyway, I found it really interesting from a philosophical point of view. How must it feel to continually witness the destruction and reconstruction of empires and cities that are deemed great beyond all measure of the word for that time? Must be both terrifying and uplifting at once.