Unit 10
The Idiocy of Urban Life
专八报名时间
Henry Fairlie
男士保养皮肤1 Between about and the life of the city is civil. Occasionally the lone footsteps of someone walking to or from work echo along the sidewalk. All work that has to be done at tho hours is uful －月份英文缩写 in bakeries, for example. Even the newspaper press stop turning forests into lies. Now and then a car comes out of the silence and cruis easily through the blinking traffic lights. The natural inhabitants of the city come out from damp baments and cellars. With their pink ears and paws, sleek, well-groomed, their whiskers combed, rats are true city dwellers. Urban life, during the hours when they reign, is urbane.
2 The rats are social creatures, as you can tell if you look out on the city street during an insomniac night. But after , the two-legged, daytime creatures of the city
begin to stir; and it is they, not the rats, who bring the rat race. You might think that human beings congregate in large cities becau they are gregarious. The opposite is true. Urban life today is aggressively individualistic and atomized. Cities are not social places.
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3 The lunacy of modern city life lies first in the fact that most city dwellers try to live outside the city boundaries. So the two-legged creatures have created suburbs, exurbs, and finally rururbs (rubs to some). Disdaining rural life, they try to create simulations of it. No effort is spared to let city dwellers imagine they are living anywhere but in a city: patches of grass in the more modest suburbs, broader spreads in the richer ones further out; prim new trees planted along the streets; at the foot of the larger backyards, a preten to bosky woodlands.
4 The professional people buy cond homes in the country as soon as they can afford them, and as early as possible on Friday head out of the city they have created. The New York intellectuals and artists quaintly say they are “going to the country” for the
weekend or the summer, but in fact they have created a little Manhattan-by-the-Sea around the Hamptons, spreading over the Long Island芒果的英文6 potato fields who earlier solitude was presumably the reason why they first went there. City dwellers take the city with them to the country, for they will not live without its pamperings. The main streets of America’s small towns, which ud to have hardware and dry goods stores, are now strips of boutiques. Old-fashioned barbers become unix hairdressing salons. The brown rats stay in the cities becau of the filth the humans leave during the day. The rats clean it up at night. Soon the countryside will be just as nourishing to them, as the city dwellers take their filth with them.
5 Work still gives meaning to rural life, the family, and churches. But in the city today work and home, family and church, are parated. What the office workers do for a living is not part of their home life. At the same time they maintain the pointless frenzy of their work hours in their hours off. They rush from the office to jog, to the gym or the YMCA pool, to work at their play with the same joylessness.
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e2e6 Even though the offices of today’s business in the city are themlves moving out to the suburbs, this does not necessarily bring the workers back clor to their workplace. It merely means that to the rush-hour traffic into the city there is now added a rush-hour traffic out to the suburbs in the morning, and back around and across the city in the evening. As the farmer walks down to his farm in the morning, the city dweller is dressing for the first idiocy of his day, which he not only accepts but even eks －insane the journey to work.
7 In the modern office building in the city there are windows that don’t open. This is perhaps the most symbolic lunacy of all. Outdoors is something you can look at through glass but not to touch or hear. The windows are a scandal becau they endanger the lives of office workers in ca of fire. But no less grievous, even on the fairest spring or fall day the workers cannot put their heads outside. Thus it is not surprising that the urban worker has no knowledge of the asons. He is aware simply that in some months there is air conditioning, and in others through the same vents come fetid central heating. Even outside at home in their suburbs the city dwellers may know that sometimes it’s hot, and
sometimes it’s cold, but no true n of the rhythms of the asons is to be had from a lawn in the backyard and a few spindly trees struggling to survive.
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