The City and The Secular Frame
In which Henry investigates urban-induced melancholy with help from Charles Taylor's 'A Secular Age'
Sometimes, for whatever reason, I get overcome by an overwhelming sadness when I drive through the city. I cannot point to any one thing in particular that causes it but I understand that this sadness is more likely to come over me during the middle of the day, when the light, heat, and traffic are heaviest, and also at times when I feel particularly sensitive; after a difficult conversation when I am left with a feeling that I have been misunderstood, or during a stressful or existentially wrought period, or after an argument. In these moments it is as if my brain can no longer defend my body and my body becomes an open target for the destabilising elements of the city.
The other day I was driving through a borough of Victoria, on my way home from a day fishing with some friends. It had been quite a hot day and I was feeling grumpy from taking too much sun. I had not slept well the night before, and on the way home from the reservoir we discussed a topic that made me feel ill at ease, that brought up memories I hadn't yet come to terms with, and that forced me to strain for explanations I wasn't yet capable of providing. It was evening, and the light was a beautiful golden colour as it sank behind the Olympic range. As I passed through downtown I saw streets jammed with pedestrians dressed for an evening on the town; the bar patios packed, crowds on the street corners milling about, taking pictures. The light on the industrial era brick buildings looked right out of a postcard. I should have been happy, because I had done happy things that day and the world around me was happy, brimming with light. Yet, as I drove through the borough, the sadness fell on me like a barrel of bricks.
It doesn't come with any one thought in particular, but more like a wind or a wild animal, something arisen out of the landscape. I first noticed it as I gazed absentmindedly at the facade of a French language school. Then it gained strength as I turned my head and took in the row of single-story houses across the street that no longer seemed to me like houses but rather house-shaped traps, engineered to keep the humans put. A torrential surge of dark restlessness followed, a river flooding the geography of myself. As the residential neighbourhood gave way to a commercial strip, a Tim Hortons, a Subway, a half-built high-rise, then an almost finished apartment block with wooden trim and matte-black siding that looked just like all the other new apartment buildings, a Meursault-like nihilism began to dig in, a sense that nothing at all mattered because here I was, driving through the city again, stuck like a mouse on the wheel, doomed to repeat the same patterns, the same thoughts, receive the same infernal transmissions from the same drab, uninspired architecture. I felt trapped. I felt, once again, like an unwilling subject of modernity, an unwilling, yet helpless participant in consumer capitalism and the hideously ugly neighbourhoods it produces.
They are not ugly in the sense that they are dirty, mishapen, or out of proportion. They are ugly because they are endlessly self-referential, like a beautiful person who can only talk about themselves. (Before long they become the ugliest person in the room. The beauty falls away from their features like paint sheering from a wall.) These buildings are ugly because they promise endless physical comforts but give you nothing for the spirit, nothing to slake the thirst for something greater, nothing aesthetically interesting enough to conjure up the mystery at the heart of things. Even some unknown, unkempt little corner will do, somewhere the tomato vine spilled over the fence, somewhere somebody made some marks, somewhere there was a garden, somewhere a presence could cut in that wasn't just the same drab repetitions.
Perhaps all of this was there and I just went by too quickly to notice. Sometimes it takes a while to get beneath the surface of things. But at least in that moment I was left with a heavy sadness, a longing above all else to escape these uniform concrete walls, these pinging phones, these matte-siding buildings and this sense of life as a hollow procession without transcendence to a death that is also without transcendence.
I have lately been rooting around in Charles Taylor's epic tome 'A Secular Age', and have found a dizzying amount of concordances with personal intuitions, as well as enough food for thought for a year of philosophical gluttony. In this book Taylor charts the course of the self and the world it inhabits, in the tradition of Latin Christendom and its cultural descendants, from 1500 to present. Simply put, in 1500, the self existed in an 'enchanted' world, a world in which the borders of the self were porous, and where spirits and demons were taken as real, that is, existing outside the mind. To a lay person in 1500, to not believe in God would have been even more strange to them as believing in God is to us moderns, steeped as we are in a scientific, materialist worldview, a 'disenchanted' world.
Taylor is careful to point out that the word 'belief' implies an act of the mind, a choice between this or that thing, whereas he is actually writing about lived experience. This phenomenological approach is what attracts me so much to Taylor's thought. He is less interested in theories about belief, less interested in theologies and scientific maxims, and more interested in the actual experience of what it is to be human, what it is to be a thinking, feeling person in a specific time. He is interested in the 'background' of our social context, and how our experience, beliefs, and assumptions about ourselves and the cosmos are shaped by this. When I say that people believed in 'spirits' or 'demons' in 1500 AD, I do not mean to suggest that people made a conscious choice to believe in such things. They believed in such things because that is what the world around them took for granted as real.
In the Medieval understanding of melancholy, I would have been suffering, as I drove through the city, from a overload of Bile or else overcome by an evil spirit, a scion of the devil whose agenda was to turn me away from God. Now, in 2025, I am only capable of understanding that as a metaphor. I can lesson the load of 'bile' through attempts at self care - I can go home and take a bath, walk my dog, go for a run, call a friend, play my guitar. If the demon were to become too all consuming I could go to the doctor and get anti- depressants. My understanding of depression - or at least my 'background', unexamined understanding of it - is that it is caused by chemicals in my brain that have become misaligned or unregulated. The lived truth, the phenomenology of it, seems much more complicated (the way it seems to rush towards me sometimes, like an animal charging through a field). But one can only speak of depression in such animate terms with people who may have experienced similiar things themselves. One could never bring it up at a party, unless the party were full of Empaths on LSD.
So one's more metaphysical experiences move inward. The communal hauntings of yore now become private hauntings. The self is now 'buffered', cut off, isolated, atomised. Many in our time feel a sort of invulnerability to forces of nature. They scoff at the idea of spirits, hauntings, and superstitions. The domain of the Gods is now one's private affair, and one shouldn't poison the well of public discourse with such nonsense. The world of phenomena exists for us to use within ourselves and for ourselves. There is no higher plane. There is no reality outside of the human mind.
I am not qualified to make grand statements on intellectual matters, but it is clear that there is a link between our lack of immediate, lived connection with the world and climate change. It is obvious that we have instrumentalized what we were perhaps meant to harmonize with. We have unleashed, in the words of Lewis Hyde, 'sixty million years of plant-captured sunlight' in the course of a few centuries. We have unearthed deep Chthonic forces in the name of progress. It is also clear that we feel little aesthetic responsibility for our planet. Culturally, it is not important to us that what we see everyday in our cities be beautiful. What is important is that it serves a purpose. Architecture is no longer a monument to God's beautiful creation but a 'Machine for living in.' We have created wastelands between the eye and the heart because our reason has told us that function is more important than form.
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In closing, I want to be clear that I am not capable nor qualified to make grand pronouncements about the state of humanity nor the universe. I write in the spirit of curiosity only. Michel de Montaigne has already written exactly what I would like to write here:
'I have no doubt that I often speak of things which are better treated by the masters of the craft, and with more truth...If anyone catches me in ignorance, he will score no triumph over me, since I can hardly be answerable to another for my reasonings, when I am not answerable for them to myself, and am never satisfied with them....'