Abstract city, concrete city, new city, old city

In my hopelessly predictable way, I was looking at the Times this morning before starting my reading in earnest -- and taking a moment to procrastinate was, I think, justified, given that I was reading about the reception of Locke's theory of personal identity in a book called The Naturalization of the Soul -- and what I found delighted me. It was a collection of Lego representations of NYC life: Central Park, the Gowanus Canal, a waiter overwhelmed by a gigantic pepper grinder, a glass of beer, another of foam (when they've just changed the keg), the Verizon building, and -- my favorite -- a plastic bag hooked on a tree branch. If I had a dollar for every plastic bag that caught on a tree in the city, I'd be a rich woman. And then there's the iconic shot from American Beauty I think of whenever I see a bag in flight, the shot which makes me consider, however adolescently, the merging of waste, choreography, and chance.

The guy who made these models is a recent expat: he says that he plays Legos with his two small sons in the living room to while away the long, dark German winter. It seems rather clever to me, turning Legos into coffees rather than battleships and buildings (as I always used to do -- I seem to remember being big on houses, too) but regardless it made me think, in that slightly foggy mindspace of the morning, of cities and how we miss them, and how missing them makes us represent them to ourselves, makes us look for new patterns in our new homes. It's not that I miss New York, particularly, even though I lived there for a year five years ago, and had a life I liked very much, and all the strategies and secrets of a city dweller (the best place to stand on the subway platform; the cheapest coffee; the least crowded bar for after-work drinks). It's more that I've spent the last six months between Ithaca, London, and Chicago, and while I've built a good collection of suitcases and learned how to make my life portable, I'm particularly aware just now of how much our sense of cities is comparative and cumulative. So, for instance, a week or so ago Tom and I went to see a revival of Every Good Boy Deserves Favour at the National Theatre. We got there early and sat on a bench along the river, eating cookies and naming all the buildings we could (not so many). London at night, from that vantage, somehow looks smaller, almost like a model. It doesn't have the dense skyline cluster of New York, or even Chicago, and every time I saw a double-decker bus drive across the bridge, the thought that this was a foreign city flickered across my brain. It doesn't take a bus, of course: going to Borough Market and seeing the pheasants and rabbits for sale, hearing the chatter of voices anywhere, shopping at Tesco, having trouble counting change, these are all reminders.

The Lego guy, who makes his living as an illustrator, did pixellated designs for the showers in his new home in Berlin. The master shower is a fancy in-joke reference to an artist who kept six kilos of butter in his studio for years (um, ew) and the kids' shower is a slightly simplified version of the NYC subway map. I think the subway map gets it right, more or less: when you pick up and move, you need to bring the necessaries with you, or find a way of keeping them a part of your days. My sine qua non isn't the MTA -- nor is it the unforgettable suitcase contents the person whose lectures on Marx and Hegel I've been attending mentioned the other day: academic gowns, German toothpaste, a copy of Barthes' The Pleasure of the Text. But even so, part of learning to travel is learning how to stop worrying about where you are and start being there. That, I think, I've managed.