Topical Guide 391
Mark Dorset
Communities (Towns or Cities): Imagining, Planning
Paradise; Shangri-La
Humboldt found that the sunset inspired him to muse. He looked around him and mused on what was left of his future. He contemplated the prospect of living the rest of his life right where he was, and he found that he liked it. He bought a tract of land and built a modest house. Subsequently, in the evenings, when he sat on his patio and watched the sun go down, he began imagining a town around him, dreamed of wandering streets that didn’t exist, pictured himself greeting people who hadn’t even seen the place yet. He began buying more land, and he began tinkering with it, improving it, sharpening the distinction between land and water by eliminating the ambiguous marshes, filling here and dredging there, until every bit of Punta Cachazuda was a well-formed island, peninsula, or waterway. Then, house by house, Humboldt and Bitsy began building the town, extending the roads and sidewalks as they went along, all according to a plan pinned to the wall of their garage.
The streets of Punta Cachazuda wandered through the town as if they’d been laid out whimsically, but in fact there was a purpose behind their intriguing sinuosity: they divagated to skirt boredom. The canals and creeks and artificial peninsulas and islands, the twisting streets, the bridges, and the tiny parks made Punta Cachazuda look, especially from the air, like the sort of omnium-gatherum landscape that model railroaders build from papier-mâché. Indeed, the town had the ragged edge of an unfinished work in papier-mâché: at the limit of development the road and sidewalk petered out, and the wind blew miniature dunes of sugary sand onto the lawn of the last-built house.Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 19
The course of history was therefore not that of a billiard-ball, which, once it had been hit, ran along a definite course; on the contrary, it was like the passage of the clouds, like the way of a man sauntering through the streets—diverted here by a shadow, there by a little crowd of people, or by an unusual way one building jutted out and the next stood back from the street—finally arriving at a place that he had neither known nor meant to reach. There was inherent in the course of history a certain element of going off the course. The present moment was always like the last house of a town, which somehow no longer quite counts among the townhouses.
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, “The Like of It Now Happens” (translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser)
He began by creating landscapes; then he created cities; then he created streets and cross streets, one by one, sculpting them out of the substance of his soul— street by street, neighborhood after neighborhood, out to the sea walls of the wharfs, where he then created the ports . . . Street by street, and the people who walked them or gazed down at them from their windows . . . He began to know some of the people, at first just barely recognizing them, but then becoming familiar with their past lives and their conversations, and he dreamed all this as if it were mere scenery to delight the eyes . . .
We’re on the road to paradise
Here we go, here we go . . .
There’s a city in my mind
Come along and take that ride
And it’s all right, baby, it’s all right
And it’s very far away
But it’s growing day by day
And it’s all right, baby, it’s all rightDavid Byrne, “Road to Nowhere”
See also: Shangri-La; Fantasy Land; Rarotonga; Arcadia TG 46
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