[…] Die großen Städte sind nicht wahr; sie täuschen
den Tag, die Nacht, die Tiere und das Kind;
ihr Schweigen lügt, sie lügen mit Geräuschen
und mit den Dingen, welche willig sind. […]
Rainer Maria Rilke, aus: Das Stundenbuch
[...] The great cities are not true; they deceive
the day, the night, the animals and the child;
their silence lies, they lie with sounds
and with things that are willing. [...]
The city as a highly cultural disrupting machine, where the connection to ecological conditions is only experienced as a citation, no longer as an embedding. As such, it threatens to be a dystopian place if one does not succeed in arriving in the creative space it spans. - The critique of the city as a distraction machine from ones own abyss, as a place of the quick promise of happiness: the Whore of Babylon greets Rilke here across the millennia.
