beware of the city

And she asked, What is City, Ternome? He, full of secular learning, exaggerated: City’s a quake. A tremor. There all things are possible, and there all things are mean. City sweeps and carries you along, never lets go of you, get you mixed up in its old secrets. In the end you take them in without ever understanding them. You tell those just-off-the-hills that that’s how it is and they eat it up: but the City has just gulped you in without showing you the ropes. A City is the ages all gathered in one place, not just in the names, houses, statues, but in the not-visible. A City sips the joys, the pain, the thoughts, every feeling, it makes its dew out of them, which you see without being able to point to it.

-Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 173, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov