Doctor Ed was away when Rosicky died, and for the first few weeks after he got home he was harddriven. Every day he said to himself that he must get out to see that family that had lost their father. One soft, warm moonlight night in early summer he started for the farm. His mind was on other things, and not until his road ran by the graveyard did he realize that Rosicky wasn't over there on the hill where the red lamplight shone, but here, in the moonlight. He stopped his car, shut off the engine, and sat there for a while.
A sudden hush had fallen on his soul. Everything here seemed strangely moving and significant, though signifying what, he did not know. Close by the wire fence stood Rosicky's mowing-machine, where one of the boys had been cutting hay that afternoon; his own work-horses had been going up and down there. The new-cut hay perfumed all the night air. The moonlight silvered the long, billowy grass that grew over the graves and hid the fence; the few little evergreens stood out black in it, like shadows in a pool. The sky was very blue and soft, the stars rather faint because the moon was full.
For the first time it struck Doctor Ed that this was really a beautiful graveyard. He thought of city cemeteries; acres of shrubbery and heavy stone, so arranged and lonely and unlike anything in the living world. Cities of the dead, indeed; cities of the forgotten, of the "put away." But this was open and free, this little square of long grass which the wind for ever stirred. Nothing but the sky overhead, and the many coloured fields running on until they met that sky. The horses worked here in summer; the neighbours passed on their way to town; and over yonder, in the cornfield, Rosicky's own cattle would be eating fodder as winter came on. Nothing could be more undeathlike than this place; nothing could be more right for a man who had helped to do the work of great cities and had always longed for the open country and had got to it at last. Rosicky's life seemed to him complete and beautiful.
Lee Kuan Yew recently said in an interview that "to understand Singapore, you've got to start off with an improbable story: It should not exist." He was of course referring to the way that Singapore has defied social, cultural, historical and economic odds since 1965 to become what it is today.
San Francisco, similarly, shouldn't exist. In its checkered and violent history, it has endured fires, earthquakes, mutinies and storms. It defies the facts of its own geography, with streets carved out from slopes steeper than black-diamond ski runs. In 1865, Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed much of Central Park in New York City (and similar parks in many other American cities), took one look at the arid, sandy site of today's lovely Golden Gate Park and said that a park could not be built there.
Much of San Francisco exists, like a palimpsest, on the detritus of its past. Large parts of North Beach, the Marina, the Embarcadero, and many other neighbourhoods are built on old buildings, sunken ships, landfill -- earlier versions of the city. Some buildings were hewn from the very wreckage of the 1906 earthquake. This is a city of ghosts, memories lying hidden under the surface but seeping up persistently, like the fog that comes every day, to reclaim the city and its people.
Here, high up in our perch on Telegraph Hill, nearly 300 feet above the bay, I see the fog approaching every day -- or, as Jeffrey Eugenides puts it in Middlesex, the city floating out to meet the fog. The light changes with each hour from our lovely outdoor patio overlooking the bay. The three bridges I can see from the patio -- the Golden Gate Bridge to my far left, the Oakland Bay Bridge to my far right (and from my bathroom window), and the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge straight ahead, but far in the distance -- take on different aspects, different colors each time I look outside. Lifelines of commerce and commute, they tether San Francisco to the American mainland; the city is ever in danger of floating away, out to the Pacific, a land and an urban, historical consciousness wholly unto itself.
Why has San Francisco haunted my mind for so long? I first came to this city as an 11-year old. I then came at 17, then 23. Each time, the ghosts of this city have haunted me more vividly. Now at 33, I have begun to understand why.
Many cities of the world provide a geographical location for collections of buildings and people, outposts of urbanity that serve as vast collective residences and factories and offices for their citizens and people. Like other great cities with an organic consciousness, San Francisco transcends its geographical location. It has a sense of place that is rooted not only in its relentless present but in its ever-present past. The echoes of its past are not just echoes or whispers; they resound daily in the life of this city. Its best neighborhoods hum with this daring vivaciousness -- both young and old at the same time, a genealogical Tiresias. The people there are hopeful, energetic, excited about the prospects of this city, its opportunities and its future. Its poorer neighborhoods (and today, we walked through a few blocks of the Tenderloin to get to church) await change expectantly -- the same change that has enabled other areas to rise from the rubble of their past.
This sense of place cannot be created at will. Los Angeles, I think, has little of the character that pervades San Francisco (though I think many Los Angelenos will feel otherwise). Even San Diego, the other city which I like so much, has a much more sterile feel compared to the organic messiness of San Francisco.
I spent a happy hour today browsing at City Lights Bookstore, after a very unhappy half hour meandering through Chinatown to find a parking spot. The bookstore was gloriously messy, jumbled and catholic -- I found a copy of our own No Other City: The Ethos Anthology of Urban Poetry (2000) on sale! -- and Chinatown was of course a huge, crowded, clot of all of Chinese civilization in an area less than one kilometer square. Here on Telegraph Hill, the roads are more predictable, but more treacherous to manoevre, because of their gradients and tight width. All these areas seem to me to embody the best of San Francisco -- unpredictability, surprise, the ability to adapt to a seemingly hostile environment, to create a new life out of nothing.
At 17 or 18, I was preparing to leave home, to shear off an established sense of place and locality. At the same time, I needed to find a new sense of bearing, and "Neighbour Rosicky" taught me how. At 33, I still savor its lessons: geography can change. Earthquakes and fires and storms come and go. The years go by, and with them, health and life. The superficial representations of location and place collapse, burn up, or simply fade away, like the ghost towns of California. People dear to us leave us. The landscapes of cities, homes and even human faces change with time and the seasons. But it is where our hearts -- those maddening, mysterious and ineffable entities -- finds their roots that matters most: an unlikely and hilly spur of land facing the Pacific, a sleepy pre-Revolutionary town in rural New Jersey far from the distractions of the big cities, or a tiny island severed from the Asian continent and free to roam free. With humility, with grace, and with hope, our hearts can make the most unlikely place the most numinous place of all.
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