"A city is a large community where people are lonesome together"
About this Quote
A city promises proximity and delivers parallel solitude. Prochnow’s line lands because it turns the usual civic brag - density, opportunity, nightlife, “never alone” - into a quiet indictment: urban life can be a choreography of near-misses. You share elevators, sidewalks, and sirens, yet remain sealed inside private schedules and private anxieties. “Lonesome together” is the barb. It doesn’t claim cities are alienating in the abstract; it suggests they’re uniquely good at staging togetherness without the risk of intimacy.
The intent reads like a midcentury warning shot at modernity’s deal: trade rootedness for mobility, trade the town square for the commute, trade known neighbors for a thousand faces you’ll never meet again. Prochnow, a writer who moved through the worlds of business and public life, is attuned to the paradox of “community” as a statistic. In a city, community can become infrastructure - you have services, crowds, shared weather - rather than relationships. The word “large” matters: scale is the culprit. Growth doesn’t automatically produce belonging; it can dilute it.
The subtext also feels less anti-city than anti-fantasy. Cities aren’t failing; they’re working exactly as designed, optimized for flow, privacy, and constant replacement. The line prefigures today’s contradictions: social feeds amid social starvation, co-working spaces where everyone wears headphones, neighborhoods where rent turns memory into turnover. Prochnow’s genius is compression: he captures the ache of being surrounded and still unseen, and makes it sound like the defining feature of the metropolis rather than an individual shortcoming.
The intent reads like a midcentury warning shot at modernity’s deal: trade rootedness for mobility, trade the town square for the commute, trade known neighbors for a thousand faces you’ll never meet again. Prochnow, a writer who moved through the worlds of business and public life, is attuned to the paradox of “community” as a statistic. In a city, community can become infrastructure - you have services, crowds, shared weather - rather than relationships. The word “large” matters: scale is the culprit. Growth doesn’t automatically produce belonging; it can dilute it.
The subtext also feels less anti-city than anti-fantasy. Cities aren’t failing; they’re working exactly as designed, optimized for flow, privacy, and constant replacement. The line prefigures today’s contradictions: social feeds amid social starvation, co-working spaces where everyone wears headphones, neighborhoods where rent turns memory into turnover. Prochnow’s genius is compression: he captures the ache of being surrounded and still unseen, and makes it sound like the defining feature of the metropolis rather than an individual shortcoming.
Quote Details
| Topic | Loneliness |
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