A quiet evening, but my rooms are facing away from the street. I see from the local websites that there were torchlight parades and scuffles on the streets nearby. (In addition to the two large rallies, there was also a basketball derby down the street, apparently as tough a ticket as a Knicks game used to be.)
My point of reference for the new city is a local novel about an odd fellow who watched it being built from his perch on the river in the old city, quite mad, a landlord who named his houses, and basically stood for the old ways of the city, and the culture. The radical prospect of trees and fresh air, and simple concrete buildings that could be filled with strong tables and overstuffed bookshelves by folks on a working person's salary was quite a threat to him. And this fellow has a modern correlative -- the spells cast by the modern real estate sections in the newspapers also look askance at these brutalist towers. Though the only time the towers have become dangerous, to my knowledge, is when the old way of thinking decides to put up some cladding, causing a tragedy, and making much of the real estate in London unsalable for over a decade.
It's not at all a culturally determined thing, or even associated with left-Hegelian cultures. Shaker Heights in Cleveland resulted from precisely the same instinct. A clean place adjacent to the city, but not determined by its ways.
This is perhaps why there could be folks parading with torches and throwing bottles on the street below, while I was calmly looking out at the trees. Instead of the city, where such things are centripetal, tending to the center and therefore resonating out through all things, the furore dissipates amid the trees and the stars. And after having vented its anger, humanity awakens in the garden, and to a more civilized existence.
At least that's the concept. But the reality is that there are very few overstuffed bookshelves these days, especially in my country, where most people read less than one book per year. People stare into the flashing colored lights until it's time to go back out into the painful world of unrewarding work. I can't fault them. I recall how television shows used to provide some refuge from things. But the whole point of this new, civilized world adjacent to the city is that we've identified the good things from the old world and tried to build a life around their objective healthfulness. If it's just a place for the worker to sleep, the beguiling and anesthetic charms of the old city would have done just as well.