I got in this argument with my mother in February:
We live in Toronto. Toronto is a city that does one particular thing very well. It is great at delivering a liminal feeling.
There are vast open spaces in the Northern part. Sometimes, you’ll be waiting for the bus on a cold spring day (no bus shelter! Wind Central!). There will be some geese nearby, nipping at the anaemic grass. And you’ll look up into the big clear sky. And you’ll look down – no people on the street as far as the eye can see. Wow. Wide open.
Sure, there are people in the handful of cars on the road, or inside those middle-of-nowhere office buildings that are becoming economically unviable.
But you’re all alone. And you get that feeling of “nothing is going on here”.
Sometimes I get that feeling when I’m in Toronto’s wonderful ravine system. The city is criscrossed with streams that flow in semi-wild ravines. This setup does double duty as natural sanctuary and flood control system.
You’d listen to the burbling stream. Smell the flowering horse chestnut. Dodge the stinging nettle growing on both sides of the trail. And think, this is nature. I am nature.
And no people anywhere around.
One time, I asked the City, “can you maybe give me other feelings than this liminal vastness?”. Other cities can give excitement, or curiosity, or a feeling of connection with the past. Rome gives beauty – with ornate fountains on every corner, clear cool stream of drinkable water. Montreal gives edginess – groups of young guys, sometimes fighting each other shirts inverted from over the head look at that one go down. London gives hustle – everyone running as rapidly as they can, trying to afford their 10 pound burgers, every little empty nook getting filled through 2000 years of settlement, even in the little dead zones under the bridge someone is running a car mechanic shop.
Toronto just gives liminal.
It’s there on a Saturday in the underground PATH system that links all our downtown skyscrapers. All stores are closed. Just a few human beings clacking their shoes on beautiful echoing granite. 50% of those you’ll meet are security guards. Vast and totally abandoned. You could roll some kids through there on their scooters have a blast (I’ve done it, I know!)
Is it possible to have a city that is all “transit area” with no destinations?
Just endless inbetween, endless road. Flanked by purely logistical amenities for your neverending journey: a Wendy’s to take care of your hunger; Shoppers Drug Mart to get bandaids for your blistered feet; 7-11 to slake your thirst; H&M to buy the next pair of jeans to replace the last disposable pair that disintegrated right on the crotch1.
When I had the argument with my mother she had just moved into the heart of downtown. Oh, how jealous I was! You see, I live in a Midtown neighbourhood that is frozen in the 1950s. Nothing ever happens. All businesses are closed on Mondays. And some, additionally, on Tuesdays.
I told her that she’ll probably have a great time in her new neighbourhood. Imagine, sitting outside at a cafe; people watching!
“Toronto isn’t Paris” was her sour response.
I get it. For years, she’d complained that we don’t have decent opera, quality orchestra performances or museums. That, not only are our cultural activities mediocre, they’re also overpriced. “All people do here is eat at restaurants and go shopping”.
Well, she’s not wrong. It’s hard to find anything that makes Toronto remarkable2. But with an attitude like “It’s not Paris”, you may as well dig a neat little hole in the ground and get all dressed up and buy yourself a nice bouquet of flowers and gently lay down in that hole.
Sometimes you have to invent your own fun. Pretend. Lie to yourself.
Sometimes you have to make your own Paris. Right there in the hallway. In that transit area between life’s loading dock and some temporary storage area from which you can pass into the backstage (before you get on a long escalator to nowhere).
Yes, there are hardly any people in Toronto. Hardly anything to do.
My wife and I are always puzzled when we see a family of German tourists, or a visiting British couple.Why have you come? . “What could there possibly be here for that you haven’t already seen?”, we want to ask.
And yet.
I’d like to think that 2,200 years ago, some weary Gaullish traveller stopped on a mid-river island for a break. “This is neat” he thought to himself. Over there, between the trees, he could imagine a large cathedral. And there, a… a… big king’s palace that will be turned into a museum. And right there on the left, lots of people sitting at little tables, eating some sort of flaky baked good with cups of hot bitter liquid. Oh how wonderful. Magnifique.
And, right there, midway between someplace that mattered and anotherplace important. Right there in the ass-end of nowhere, he decided to make Paris.
- As I learned from the book “Ametora“, American lost its capacity to make the kind of denim fabric they had in the 1950s. All the jeans we wear are made of short-length inferior fibres, and that’s why our jeans disintegrate from sitting in an office chair, while great-grandpappy-Filipp’s jeans could survive the grueling work of a gold prospector out West. Japan is currently the place where they have the proper fabric and looms to make sturdy jeans. (Although, just because you see “Japan” on a store, it doesn’t mean that their jeans are hardy – I’m looking at you, Uniqlo) ↩︎
- Except, unfortunately, the food is perhaps remarkable. Where else can you tear into sauce-soaked Ethiopian injera, have a deathly-spicy Tibetan tripe dish and drink Vietnamese coffee so friggin dark that I had to ask “where is the condesed milk” and they said “oh, it’s in there” and it just tasted like the deepest darkest chocolate. ↩︎
