The City I Keep Returning To

There is a city I return to in memory more often than I return to it in person. This is not unusual — most cities of the imagination are denser than the real ones, more vivid, more certain of themselves. But this particular city has a quality that I find difficult to describe precisely: it is the city where I first understood that I would not become who I had planned to be.

This is not a complaint. It is, in retrospect, among the most useful things that has ever happened to me. But it took years to be grateful for it.

On the cities that form you

I am from a city, went to school in another, came of age in a third. The third is the one I mean when I say the city. It had an argument with me. It was not indifferent the way that places of pure childhood can be indifferent — the way you inhabit them so completely that they cease to be places and become just the texture of being alive. The city I mean was a place I arrived at with plans, which it took cheerfully apart.

What it offered instead was something I didn't yet know I wanted: a community of people who were serious about thinking. Students, professors, a few journalists, an extraordinary bookshop. The conversations in that city were the first conversations I had that felt like they could arrive somewhere. Where the point of speech was not to display intelligence but to find out what was true.

What I keep returning to

When I return in memory, I always end up at the same few places. A particular reading room where the light came through old windows and pooled on the desks. A stretch of road that flooded every monsoon and was crossed by everyone hoisting their trousers. A small hotel that served breakfast until noon and where, on Sunday mornings, you could sit with coffee and a newspaper for hours without anyone making you feel that you should be somewhere else.

None of these places are remarkable. What they held was time — slow time, the kind that you almost can't afford anymore. The kind in which you could have a conversation that lasted three hours and not feel you had wasted the afternoon.

"We do not remember days, we remember moments." — Cesare Pavese

What the city taught me

The city taught me that the plans were the problem. The plans were a way of not being present to what was actually in front of me, which was — it seems so obvious now — everything I needed.

I go back sometimes. The reading room is renovated. The road was widened a few years ago and no longer floods. The hotel is gone. The places that hold memory are not usually the ones that endure.

But I keep the conversations. I carry the knowledge that it's possible, in the right circumstances, to think with other people — really think, not just agree or argue past each other. That it is possible to take ideas seriously without taking yourself too seriously. That the best things often arrive in the gaps between what you expected.