[Reader-list] Lewis Mumford - Child of the City

[hpp at vsnl.com]

Dear Friends

"Only mammalian tenderness and human love have saved mankind from the documented gods that rise up from the unconscious when man lets himself off from the cosmic and earthly sources of his life.”  --- Lewis Mumford


Today, 19 October, is the 110th birth anniversary of Lewis Mumford, American social philosopher, and one of the leading thinkers and writers of the 20th century. 

Born in Flushing, New York, Mumford was, in his own words, a child of the city. In an assiduously and single-mindedly pursued writing life, spanning over 60 years, Mumford wrote some thirty books, covering subjects as diverse as the history of cities, the history of machine technology, art and architectural criticism, and literary criticism. He is most widely known for the books "The City in History" and "The Myth of the Machine : The Pentagon of Power". He died on 26 January 1990. 

Though widely honoured during his lifetime, with fellowships, professorships, awards and honorary doctorates, he remains largely unknown in the field of public culture even in his native America.

I am reproducing below an extract from his autobiographical volume "Sketches from Life", which Prof KT Ravindran (of the School of Planning & Architecture, New Delhi) once told me moved him to tears.

“I loved the great bridges and walked back and forth over them, year after year. ... One twilight  hour in early spring, starting from the Brooklyn end, I faced into the west wind sweeping over the rivers from New Jersey. The ragged, slate-blue cumulus clouds that gathered over the horizon left open patches for the light of the waning sun to shine through, and finally, as I reached the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge, the sunlight spread across the sky, forming a halo around the jagged mountain of skyscrapers, with the darkened loft buildings and warehouses huddling below in the foreground. The towers, topped by the golden pinnacles of the new Woolworth building, still caught the light even as it began to ebb away. Three-quarters of the way across the Bridge I saw the skyscrapers in the deepening darkness become slowly honeycombed with lights until, before I reached the Manhattan end, these buildings piled up in a dazzling mass against the indigo sky. Here was my city, immense
 overpowering, flooded with energy and light; there below lay the river and the harbour, catching the last flakes of gold on their water ... And there was I, breasting the March wind, drinking in the city and the sky, both vast, yet both contained in me, transmitting through me the great mysterious will that had made them and the promise of the new day that was still to come. The world at that moment, opened before me, challenging me, beckoning me, demanding something of me that it would take more than a lifetime to give, but raising all my energies by its own vivid promise to a higher pitch. In that sudden revelation of power and beauty, all the confusions of adolescence dropped from me, and I trod the narrow, resilient boards of the footway with a new confidence that came, not from my isolated self alone but from the collective energies I had confronted and risen to.”


V Ramaswamy
Calcutta