I have to admit that with the rain this morning, I pussied out and took the T to “work”. I don’t have proper rain gear for riding yet. But if it’s just drizzly tomorrow, I’ll ride in. I will. I did leave about fifteen minutes early this morning, anticipating that since we haven’t had much rain, people would be acting all weird. You know how people are whenever there’s a change in the weather. It’s an excuse for all manner of tomfoolery.

Owing to my early departure, the ride in on the T wasn’t bad, although I never like stepping into one of those fogged-up trains, with the condensation on the windows. And then if it’s raining like that, and the train’s packed, what the heck do you with your umbrella? It’s a problem.

Riding the T instead of my bike did give me an opportunity to get started on my new T-reading: Richard Sennett’s Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization. (He is Chair of The Cities Programme at The London School of Economics and the author of several books on cities I can heartily recommend: The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities, and The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity & City Life, among them.)

This morning I got as far as the Introduction and Chapter One: “Nakedness”. In the introduction, in a section on “the passive body” Sennett talks about the geography of the modern city:

People travel today at speeds our forbears could not at all conceive. The technologies of motion—from automobiles to continuous, poured-concrete highways—made it possible for human settlements to extend beyond tight-packed centers out into peripheral space. Space has thus become a means to the end of pure motion—we now measure urban spaces in terms of how easy it is to drive through them, to get out of them. The look of urban space enslaved to these powers of motion is necessarily neutral: the driver can drive safely only with the minimum of idiosyncratic distractions; to drive well requires standard signs, dividers, and drain sewers, and also streets emptied of street life apart from other drivers. As urban space becomes a mere function of motion, it thus becomes less stimulating in itself; the driver wants to go through space, not be aroused by it.

…Navigating the geography of modern society requires very little physical effort, hence engagement; indeed, as roads become straightened and regularized, the voyager need account less and less for the people and buildings on the street in order to move, making minute motions in an ever less complex environment. Thus the new geography reinforces the mass media. The traveler, like the television viewer, experiences the world in narcotic terms; the body moves passively, desensitized in space, to destinations set in a fragmented and discontinuous urban geography.

Both the highway engineer and the television director create what could be called “freedom from resistance.” The engineer designs ways to move without obstruction, effort or engagement; the director explores ways for people to look at anything, without becoming to uncomfortable.

And so on. What Sennett is doing in the book is drawing our attention to all sorts of connections like this. He’s right on the mark with many observations, like: “The triumph of individualized movement in the formation of the great cities of the nineteenth century led to the particular dilemma with which we now live, in which the freely moving individual body lacks physical awareness of other human beings.”

In the first chapter Sennett looks at “the citizen’s body in Perikles’ Athens” and draws some interesting connections between nakedness and democracy, which have, mercifully, gone out of fashion. He includes a fascinating discussion of the ancient world’s ideas on body heat—“women were thought to be colder versions of men”–it thus made sense to keep them covered up. In the Greek view “at least two genders correspond to but one sex, where boundaries between male and female are of degree and not of kind…a one-sex body.” For most of Western history, he reports, “medicine thus spoke about ‘the body’—one body, whose physiology moved from very cold to very hot, from very female, to very male.” Is this what Paris Hilton is talking about?

And speaking of hot. “The gymnasium,” Sennett says, “taught young Athenians how to become naked.” I tried to get my teaching degree in that but they didn’t offer it at Indiana University. Anyway, sexuality, according to the author, was “a positive element of citizenship.” Has he met Suzie Bright, I wonder?

It goes on and gets even more heated from there until we arrive at the “erotic bond between citizen and city,” which we best see nowadays, I think, in the slogan “I ♥ NY”. I was watching a Sex and the City rerun the other night where Carrie turns down sex with a handsome sailor because he insults New York, and she can’t have anyone insulting the biggest love of her life.

Every city aspires to be so well and passionately loved. Even Indianapolis, in my youth, came up with an ad campaign, complete with a jingle, the chorus of which was “move over New York, apple is our middle name!” But only a handful of great cities the world over inspire their citizens to true love. Is Boston one of them? Sure, you might marry Boston, but you’d still be sneaking off to New York for some hot lovin’ whenever you could.

Don’t deny it. You know you would.