ABSTRACT
For the city and the book are opposed forms: to force the city's spread, contingency and aimless motion into the tight progression of a narrative is to risk a total falsehood. There is no single point of view from which one can grasp the city as a whole. That indeed is the central distinction between the city and the small town. For each citizen, the city is a unique and private reality; and the novelist, planner or sociologist (whose aims have more in common than each is often willing to admit) finds himself dealing with an impossibly intricate tessellation of personal routes, spoors and histories within the labyrinth of the city… Writing a book one pretends to an omniscience and a command of logic which the experience of living in a city continuously contradicts.
