This was supposed to be part of a series on the idea of cultural and intellectual community. The second part of the series will probably not be written any time soon. I’m keeping this up as a standalone piece.
Growing up in a suburb north of Baltimore, I sorely wanted to be a city kid. I feel some embarrassment admitting it now, even though I have had much sillier desires in my life. But anything I write about cultural community would be incomplete without tracing the history of how I conceived of that idea in my own life. Silly though it may be, the desire existed—exists—nonetheless.
I had known my fair share of city kids through school, summer programs, or friends of friends and had often envied them. Whether they were from Baltimore or New York or D.C. or Paris, it seemed to me at the time that they all had a shared secret epistemology, and that was why I envied them. I use “epistemology” deliberately, not out of pretension. The things they knew I could probably learn on my own by closely reading City Paper (may it rest in peace) or keeping abreast of music and art-related Facebook events in Hampden and Charles Village and that area around North Avenue just east of I-83. It was how they knew the things they knew that made them stand apart. The writer Aisling McCrea describes it as follows:
Generally speaking, the city creatures I’ve known have been products of and contributors to specific “scenes.” Maybe as a teenager they liked a certain music venue or neighborhood, whose faces and figures became familiar after regular weekend visits—they would go to see one beloved band, who’d open for another, who’d become a new favorite to emulate and maybe even befriend—they would come to have a sense for the good places to eat and drink, far away from the places where the tourists go. The city’s scene would open itself up to them, flower-like. Of course, not everyone who grows up in a city has some cool documentary-worthy adolescence—there’s drudgery and banality everywhere—but from speaking to people I know, there is at least a sense in cities that something is happening around you. If you can’t get in the door—the door behind which excitement and creation and possibility is happening—you can at least see the door, hear the sounds escape from underneath it.1
My ways of knowing were individualized; theirs were collective. They had cultural community, and I did not. They knew. At best, I knew of.
At the time, however, I did not understand it in terms of epistemology. Instead, I imagined it in terms of ontology: I imagined that the primary difference between suburban kids and city kids had to do with who and what we were, rather than how we knew what we knew. Accordingly, after matriculating at a small liberal arts college in Los Angeles, I did not start to imagine how I would join a cultural community and take on new ways of knowing. Instead, I imagined I would retroactively become a city kid.2 In Highland Park on a Saturday evening, there was none of the overwhelming stillness that would have characterized such an evening in the neighborhood where I grew up, and it was impossible to resist the the conviction that McCrea so aptly describes: something is happening here. I needed only to find out what it was; then my history would be rewritten and my ontological status would be transformed. I would not be a suburban kid transformed into a city kid. It would turn out that I had been a city kid the whole time.
Within a few months, I realized that this was one of many delusions I’ve had about my capacity for remaking myself. It didn’t help matters much that I wasn’t a permanent resident; I lived in the dorms and returned to Maryland between semesters. For another, I have always been naturally reserved. To others, this can often resemble coldness or a preference for aloneness. But the real problem was not others’ perceptions of me. The real problem was that I could not get out of my own head. I convinced myself that I had the stink of a loser on me; therefore there was no point in trying to engage with others. Even when I was giving myself low-grade hearing loss at the Hi-Hat or All Star Lanes, I was really only listening to the sounds coming from underneath the door.
Still, hearing the sounds escaping from underneath the door was always better than learning about those sounds on the Internet a week or two after the fact. Faced with the tension between the person I wanted to be and the person I knew I was, I adopted a slightly more reasonable delusion: once I graduated I would stay in Los Angeles indefinitely and, for the first time in my life, become a full-time, permanent, and enthusiastic participant in a cultural community. I would likely remain at the ragged edge of such a community, rather than finding my way to its warm center.3 I would never become one of those niche characters occasionally profiled in prominent New York-based publications (you have decisively made it in L.A. when people in Manhattan feel compelled to know who you are)—I would never become one of those people Everybody Knows provided your definition of “everybody” is limited to a handful of trendy ZIP codes in expensive coastal cities. But never becoming such a person was in many ways the more desirable outcome. A world in which strangers felt compelled to have an opinion on me would be nightmarish.
I persisted in this delusion right up until the world fell apart and I had to do my last half-semester of college online. Since then, I have sometimes wondered about what would have happened in the absence of the pandemic. Would I have grown out of my reserved tendencies? Would my reasonable delusion have turned out to be a realistic expectation? Or would I have found my way back to an East Coast suburb within a year or two? Had my time in suburbia (maybe even exurbia if you are strict about definitions) created some incurable defect in my mind that prevented me from ever taking on a new epistemology? Emerson’s condemnation of the “rage of travelling” in “Self-Reliance” comes to mind: “The soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home […] He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and mind have become old and dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to ruins.”
But counterfactuals are a fool’s errand even when applied to events of real consequence. I can only speak authoritatively about what really happened: I moved back home, finished out my last half-semester of college, and got my diploma in the mail around Memorial Day weekend. I was promised a livestreamed graduation in mid-June; it turned out to have been pre-recorded. Around that time I abandoned any aspiration of moving back to Los Angeles: abandoned, too, the hope of ever becoming part of a cultural community. To become someone who knows was nothing more than a four-year fever dream, and the real world had just jarred me awake. I could only be someone who knows of.
That, at least, was how I thought of things at the time. More details will follow in Part II.
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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the bylined author. They do not represent the views or opinions of people, institutions, or organizations with which the author may or may not be associated in a personal, professional, or educational capacity.
Aisling McCrea, “Love Letter to a Soulless Corporation,” Current Affairs, March 4, 2019, https://archive.is/wNou5.
I saw, and continue to see, no contradiction in calling Los Angeles a city. The old joke that Los Angeles is seventy-two suburbs in search of a city is just that, a joke, unless one lives in a fantasy world where every suburb has, within walking distance, a concert venue, a couple of bars, a scattering of little independent stores catering to a variety of non-mainstream interests, and some excellent cheap non-European restaurants.
My word choice here is indebted to F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, ch. 1.