City Of God 28

The city is a necessary evil. Like taxes. Like toilet paper. Like family. We cannot live together and we cannot live apart. We need one another as humans because we are an intensely social and intensely vulnerable species. We cannot live alone, away from one another. Every time it has been tried it has resulted in some kind of tragedy. Even the most introverted hermit cannot exist outside of the collective. But we all share in common a certain feature, or trait, that makes co-existence difficult and nearly impossible. Each one of us thinks that we are a little god. Sad, eh? I think this is what they mean when they talk about original sin, and that that was the intent of the story of the Garden of Eden. The bad tree full of tempting and delicious fruit, is the tree not simply of knowledge of good and evil, it is the tree of human arrogance and hubris. So we live as though in two conflicting states of mind: our need for one another, and our overweening desire to be alone. As I wrote in yesterday's post, in many ways, living downtown sucks. Big time! There are noises day and night from sirens, construction, idiots in altered states and the usual daily douchebaggery that we all share in common, but multiplied by a factor of perhaps one hundred because there are so many of us crowded together in this damn city. There is also the matter of how we perceive others whose lives and presence and sometimes physical selves crowd and invade our personal space. Negotiating boundaries is not a cakewalk. In my less grumpy moments I try to see those around me through the eyes of a kind of tender, disinterested love, and when I give way to this force, I often become even less grumpy. But there is a catch. Chances are that I am the only person in the room or on the sidewalk or on the bus who is thinking that way. Everyone else, it seems, just wants to get through their day, without having to bother with any of the brainless idiots around them, and hurry back with their little smartphones keeping them company, all the way back to their apartments and condos, where but for their little doggie or pet iguana, they will have only their own useless, lonely and unhappy presence to contend with. Caught again in that pleasant illusion of solitude. My father was like that. He spent his elder years living in a small community. He became increasingly withdrawn, and really grew to hate people (not a huge stretch, since he had always been a misanthrope) The social isolation seemed to make things worse for him. He did have friends nearby, but during the period I was sporadically staying with him, when he was already in his early seventies, I seemed to be the only person in his range who could challenge his backward and very narrow-minded thinking, and seldom without consequences and blowback. He had lots of peace and quiet, and the birdsong in the mornings and evenings was something from the portals of heaven. He never seemed to notice the singing of birds, and when I tried to alert him to this, he claimed, or feigned deafness, which I found odd because, even if he heard a slight creaking on the floor as I was on my way to my room, he would from the safety of his bedroom and closed door unleash on me such a volley of verbal abuse as to make it very necessary that I make other plans. There was nothing wrong with his hearing. He just happened to be very selective about it. One day, while he was reading in his living room in the middle of the day, the family on the property next door was outside and the parents were playing with their children. There was some noise, nothing intolerable. My father went out there and yelled at them all to shut up. It was only two years later that he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. I don't know where the chicken began, and where the egg. But I am persuaded that even if dementia was inevitable to my father, I wonder if it's progress might have been slowed or even significantly delayed had he lived in the city, in close contact with others, so that he couldn't avoid having to cope with the whole rough fabric of coexistence with others. I am, understandably, nervous about Alzheimer's, given that I am my father's son, regardless of his dislike for me and my uneasiness about our relationship. I would like to believe that living and doing things differently from the old man will provide a buffer to mental and cerebral deterioration, given that I am fluent in another language (Spanish) have a rich and active social life, that I am politically and socially active, that I am a practicing artist, a professing Christian with a rich spiritual life, and that I live a healthy life without harmful substances, and especially given that I take a lot of joy in life, and this could be because I consider life to be a gift from God. Time alone will tell. But because we are such narcissists, and because we like to think of ourselves as little gods, more than ever we need to be together, if only to teach us humility, if only to help us to learn to appreciate and love the strangers among us, because we ourselves are strangers among others.