Walk through the city first thing in the morning. It’s beautiful. There’s an optimism about the streets in the watery summer dawn, pale and gleaming as if fresh from the shower, sluiced of all the sordidness and sin of the night before – there's an air there that can't fail to make you believe that hope always finds a way to fruition, that the sun will always rise... for an hour or two in the morning light the stones look clean, the roads sparkling, the pavement free of the usual jumble, the flotsam and jetsam and human remains. The shops roll back blinds and open doors with a yawn and a rub of the eyes, carpets and lino and shelves inside perfectly ordered, perfectly untouched, perfectly ready for the business of business, the old profit and loss. Cafes wait with tables ready set, chairs expectant, crockery gleaming in anticipation of the coffee, the croissants, the steam and crumb and spoons licked clean.
It's all so... alive with possibility. It's bursting with potential. Anything could happen; incredible things could be achieved. Everything's ready. It's a human ideal, unsullied as yet by the disappointment and dirt of the day. And every morning it happens again, this rebirth, this fresh start. The city in the morning... it's a wholly different place to the city at night. The throb and adrenaline, the danger and passion and furious energy of the dark hours are buried, forgotten as if they never existed at all; the night's vampires are banished and for those first few hours of daylight it feels like they'll never come out again. As if we'll never let them out again.
The people in the city in the morning radiate that same expectation, that same air of starting afresh. Even those who wear their night's activities like stains on their shirts, hurrying to work with ties askew and shaking with hangovers... their bodies are already forgiving them. We're going to give you another chance, their bodies say. Look how we're healing ourselves, look how we're working to make good all the bad that you did last night. We're giving you another chance because that's what we do. That's what we'll always do.
The city streets have been going through this daily rebirth every morning for centuries. And if every evening they once again slip into seductively bad old habits, picking up old vices, revisiting old sorrows and sins... there's never any bad feeling for it. Every morning it feels like the streets shrug it off again, start again. Cities are so beautiful because they're so human – and so incredibly forgiving of humanity. They are proof that the sun also rises.
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This is the age of the slogan, the soundbite, the snappy phrase in place of considered argument. Thought is dying; reason’s gone critical. In bookshops and magazine racks we’re told only what we want to hear: we’re told it in neat, bullet-pointed affirmations of our own worth.
No more. This is the fightback. The resuscitation. This is the slogan as explainer of the world. One a day for a year. Three hundred and sixty five phrases, soundbites and bullet points with which to make sense of the way things are now and point to how things could be tomorrow. Read them and weep.
Defining the age through a slogan a day
This is the age of the slogan, the soundbite, the snappy phrase in place of considered argument. Thought is dying; reason’s gone critical. In bookshops and magazine racks we’re told only what we want to hear: we’re told it in neat, bullet-pointed affirmations of our own worth.
No more. This is the fightback. The resuscitation. This is the slogan as explainer of the world. One a day for a year. Three hundred and sixty five phrases, soundbites and bullet points with which to make sense of the way things are now and point to how things could be tomorrow. Read them and weep.
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