"No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning"
About this Quote
A city that can swallow your whole day just to escape it is, in Connolly's view, already flirting with moral failure. The line lands with a deceptively gentle domesticity - a morning walk - and then turns that modest measure into an indictment of modern scale. He isn't merely nostalgic for cobblestones and village life; he's demanding a human-sized world where the individual can still negotiate the terms of belonging.
Connolly, a mid-century journalist and critic, lived through the era when cities stopped being places you inhabited and started becoming systems you serviced: commuter belts, ring roads, zoning, the slow bureaucracy of distance. "Walk out" is the key verb. It implies more than physical exit; it gestures at autonomy, the right to withdraw, to reset, to not be trapped by the infrastructure that claims to organize your life. A city too big to leave on foot doesn't just exhaust the body - it narrows the imagination. You begin to accept that everything meaningful is far away, mediated, ticketed, scheduled.
There's also a sly class anxiety hiding in the simplicity. The wealthy can always "walk out" by other means - taxis, trains, second homes. The morning threshold becomes a test of equity: if the city demands money to escape it, it's not a home, it's a machine. Connolly's sentence is elegantly absolutist, the kind of clean standard that makes you feel how quickly we stopped insisting on one.
Connolly, a mid-century journalist and critic, lived through the era when cities stopped being places you inhabited and started becoming systems you serviced: commuter belts, ring roads, zoning, the slow bureaucracy of distance. "Walk out" is the key verb. It implies more than physical exit; it gestures at autonomy, the right to withdraw, to reset, to not be trapped by the infrastructure that claims to organize your life. A city too big to leave on foot doesn't just exhaust the body - it narrows the imagination. You begin to accept that everything meaningful is far away, mediated, ticketed, scheduled.
There's also a sly class anxiety hiding in the simplicity. The wealthy can always "walk out" by other means - taxis, trains, second homes. The morning threshold becomes a test of equity: if the city demands money to escape it, it's not a home, it's a machine. Connolly's sentence is elegantly absolutist, the kind of clean standard that makes you feel how quickly we stopped insisting on one.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wanderlust |
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