Cyclists in the City of God
Last summer I wroteabout trekking through the Cambridgeshire fens with a bicycle, cows, and G.K.Chesterton. This summer brings me back to the same story—sort of. Put me on thewrong end of the bicycle, turn the cow into a metal bull, and, fittingly, keepG.K. Chesterton exactly the same. What you get is me getting steamrolled by acyclist in Central Park and almost losing my faith in humanity.
Chesterton wrote widely during his time as an earlytwentieth-century public intellectual. His work ranges from philosophy,criticism, and drama to metaphysical fiction and lay theology. His witty styleages like whiskey, and classics like Orthodoxyand The Everlasting Man areperhaps even more acutely compelling today than they were when they were firstwritten. But overlooked among these popular titles is Chesterton’s introductionto Elsie M. Lang’s Literary London, aquirky 1906 study of the canonical places and faces of nineteenth-century Englishculture. I happened upon this gem in one of the more obscure corners of WidenerLibrary, and I was as surprised to see Chesterton’s name in it as I was to findthe book still held together in my hands.
In the seven brief pages of the introduction, Chesterton ischaracteristically contrarian. “The trouble about people living in a big cityis not that they do not know anything about the country,” the opening runs, “Itis that they do not know anything about the great city.” Wordsworth andColeridge start rolling in their graves with the next paragraph, “People saythat the country is more poetical. It is not true… If we applied to human tracesthe same vivid imagination which we apply to the traces of beasts or birds we shouldfind not only the street, but any chance inch of the street, far more romanticthan a glade.”
This line hits me hard every morning as I dodge the leakytrash bags and smeared dog poop that litter the six block-commute between my apartmentand the six train. It hit me even harder last Saturday morning, when I went fora run in Central Park, started across East Drive, and got slammed into the concreteby a cyclist. We both scraped by with minimal blood and bruises, but in the splitsecond I sprawled across every chance inch of the all-too-human street, I wonderedjust how poetical GKC would find NYC in the twenty-first century.
I love glades. I love trees, mountains, brooks, deserts,fens, beaches, lakes, ruined abbeys, lonely wanderers above seas of fog—everythinglauded into clichés by romantic poets and granola-toting wilderness guides. I’mmost at ease in nature, and I rarely feel closer to God than I do when I’m wanderingaround some uncivilized patch of earth. I love the quiet, the simplicity, theloneliness, the peace… What will it take to feel the same romantic serenity rushingalong First Ave, with sirens blaring and dumpsters reeking and people jostlingand clocks running and everything steaming in a hot, sticky, stuffy urbansweat?
Life began in a garden. (And it’s worth noting that the qualityof that life plummeted when someone took too large a bite out of a Big Apple.)But if we believe St. John’s Revelation, life ends in a city. If Act One isEden, Act Five is the New Jerusalem. That doesn’t mean that the New Heavens andthe New Earth will be exactly like New York—I seriously doubt that anyone couldcall an eternity dodging cyclists and Cerberus poop anything close to Heaven—butit does mean that Chesterton, unsurprisingly, is on to something.
We look around nature, and we see the handiwork of God. Welook around the city, and we see the workmanship of men. It feels mechanical,fake, and ordinary—until we remember that those craftsmen are made in the imageof Christ. GKC puts it this way, “This is the difficulty of the town: thatpersonality is so compressed and packed into it that we cannot realise itspresence. The smallest street is too human for any human being to realise.”
Some artful city planner mapped out the curve in East Drivewhere the cyclist wiped me out. Some architect designed the rusty balconyoutside my apartment, some construction worker poured the concrete in the trash-coveredsidewalk, some highly-trained specialist perfected the chemical composition ofthe concrete mix. All of them had families, stories, and dreams. Look aroundthe city, and you see evidence, clear as a lake in Scotland, of human creatorsat work, fashioning the world around them just as the Lord first fashioned theworld. If these sub-creations bring our thoughts to the sub-creators, and fromthe sub-creators to the Creator himself, every chance inch of the city becomes ameeting place with God. Every chance inch becomes a micro-alter, a small piece ofa holy temple we city-dwellers choose to enter but never really leave.
After the cyclist and I shook hands and parted ways, I ran-hobbledthe rest of my route down the Hudson. I finished by the Charging Bull statue justsouth of Wall Street. I laughed to myself and tried to crane my neck around thegaggle of tourists. It was quite a different cow, and quite a different pilgrimage,from the ones I experienced last summer. But then I remembered the personalitybehind the statue—the personality behind even the selfie sticks—and the Personalityone step behind both. And the moment, no matter what GKC says, was in no way romantic.It was sacred.
Lauren Spohn '20 is an English concentrator in Currier House.