on "seeing" cities and city people

As I prepare to teach this class again, I am more alert to how the word "city" and "urban" are used in everyday life. I increasingly find another occasion to learn something new about this space in the present and the past.

The photograph I took in Liverpool in 2011.

For example, I just returned from a second trip to a remote part of Virginia. While there, I read with new eyes a handwritten story by a man who lived in the antebellum house where I worked on the book  before me. In it, the man recalled his memories of growing up in his small town during the late nineteenth century.  Apparently, some city girls visited the town in question and said something along the lines of "What's the matter with you?" to the man, who was then a boy. The writer found this use of the word "matter" shocking. Folks in his more rural space used this word to refer to a purulent discharge from the eyes. A most trusted dictionary confirms such a usage. The writer himself used this incident to characterize urban dwellers as being both crude and fast people, traits many still associate with city folks (This is a topic that students enrolled in this course will doubtless get tired of hearing).

For now, as I return to my book in dear Tuscaloosa, after having driven part of the way back with my husband, I am reminded of how today's travelers automatically sense that cities are places in which we  are not only crude and fast, but places through which we literally move crudely and fast. Certainly I always knew we were approaching an urban area because the cars and trucks around us suddenly moved faster. Maybe the drivers just wanted to get somewhere more quickly or miss afternoon rush hour (the latter was once the case for my husband). Still, I find urban spaces, no matter how fast we moved through them, quite fascinating even if you never get off the highway.

I am now reminded of travel writer Somerset Maugham. His 1930 book  The Gentleman in the Parlour: A Record of a Journey from Rangoon to Haiphong addresses his journeys through the East. While in Thailand, he admitted that he took pleasure in feeling as many emotions as possible by simply sitting on a train. He said a depot in Pennsylvania held all the "mystery" seen in the massiveness of New York and  London. I shared this sentiment after taking a train from Oxford to Liverpool to see an exhibit in a museum. It was a characteristically rainy day in England. I stopped only to snap a photo of the harbor in Liverppool before dashing into the museum for two hours. I hurried back to the railway, content to "see" Liverpool from a distance.