ANONYMOUS CITY

“I'd forgotten how relieving the anonymity of city life could be. People weren't forever having to explain themselves here: a city was a decipherable interface, a sort of lexicon of human behaviour that did half the work of decoding the mystery of self, so that you could effectively communicate through a kind of shorthand. Where I had lived before, in the countryside, each individual was the unique, often illegible representation of their own acts and aims. So much got lost or mistaken in the process of self explanation; so many unfounded assumptions were made; so many words failed to maintain an integral meaning.”