The voice of the city.

It’s not very rarely that you hear statements like:

This city is selfless. Man, it has an undying spirit.

or maybe something like:

This city is boring, how can any sane person ever survive here?

But what is it that really defines a city, any city. Obviously, most of the opinions put out are individualistic and personal in nature. But, as O’Henry asks about New York in a short story titled the same as this post:

What does this big -er- enormous -er- whopping city say?It must have some a voice of some kind. Does it ever speak to you? How do you interpret its meaning? It is a tremendous mass, but it must have a key.

Doesn’t each of the cities really have something to say to anyone of us? To convey something deeper to anyone of us out there living in its belly? To each of us who play a part, making up the whole, which is referred to as the city? When we refer to a city, do we refer to the “concrete  and brick with a dash of mortar” kind or to the ones who inhale and exhale for their sustenance? Are we really giving a complete picture of what the city stands for? Or are we making up the image of the city with those statements of ours? How do you go about describing a city at all or rather how does a city describe itself? O’Henry puts all this, very beautifully, in the following lines:

Give me an idea of what the it (the city) would say if it should speak. It is bound to be a mighty and far-reaching utterance. To arrive at it, we must take the tremendous crash of the chords of the day’s traffic, the laughter and the music of the night, the solemn tones of the Dr.Parkhurst, the rag-time, the weeping, the stealthy hum of cab-wheels, the shout of the press agent, the tinkle of the fountains on the roof-gardens, the hullabaloo of the strawberry vendor and the covers of Everybody’s Magazine, the whispers of the lovers in the park – all these sounds must go into the Voice -not combined, but mixed, and of the mixture an essence made; and of the essence an extract – an audible extract, of which one drop shall form the thing we seek (the voice of the city).