(no subject)

[rm]

Every city has a place and situation where it gives up its secrets. Washington DC is easy, nearly a whore, thanks to the monuments. NYC is trickier, but it's there, on Wall Street at night in the snow and in Brooklyn by the water in the wind. Sydney was eluding me, until it was a street I'd walked down a hundred times, but hadn't registered in the right way (is it because I'm on the other side of the planet that my former ability to read maps has now resulted in my constantly orienting them the wrong way?) and hadn't seen at night and when I touched the stone and it started to rain and the monument across the way was lit up, then I got it. And it was nice, being able to walk aimlessly here at night, not because I was looking for something, but because I had found it.

*

seriously random aside: Nicole Kidman has the _greatest_ dress on the Golden Globes. Woo.

Comments

[ozfille]

You have me intrigued, which street and which particular monument? There are only two things I'd classify as monuments in Sydney and they'd be the cenotaph in Martin Place and the War Memorial in Hyde Park, I don't think we're big on monuments.

If you chose either of them, it was an interesting choice. Both of them lie at the heart of our sense of our history and how we see ourselves. They are symbols of the fact we celebrate defeats. I'm not sure celebrate is quite the word, it is not that we brood either. It's just that I don't believe there ever was any sense of triumphalism,when they were constructed. It wasn't a victory arch as the Romans would have built rather they are representative of sombre reflection and memory of loss.