The following stories depict the city of Northern Venice, as seen by its inhabitants past and present.
From anywhere, but especially from here out on the sund, Hansastadt Stralsund
has the most heartbreakingly beautiful skyline: is this the Venice of the North? [...]
Other Venices of the North are Bruges, Aalborg, Amsterdam, Birmingham,
Manchester, the Maryhill area of Glasgow...
(Jonathan Meades, Magnetic North)
I love the soft burbling of streams and the cherry trees in blossom. But I agree with Plato
when he makes Socrates say that he has nothing to learn from trees, only from the men in the city.
(Annie Ernaux, Introduction to Exteriors)
...And with these, the sense of the world’s concreteness, irreducible, immediate, tangible,
of something clear and closer to us: of the world no longer as a journey having constantly to be remade [...]
but as the rediscovery of a meaning, the perceiving that the earth is a form of writing,
a geography of which we had forgotten that we ourselves are the authors.
(Georges Perec, Species of Spaces)
email: greymirths@gmail.com