"The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish"
About this Quote
A big city, in Lorca's hands, isn’t a backdrop; it’s a machine that rewrites the human nervous system. The pairing is immediate and brutal: “extra human architecture” suggests structures that have outgrown their makers, buildings no longer scaled to bodies or needs but to capital, speed, and ambition. “Extra human” isn’t praise. It’s a quiet horror: the city as something post-human, indifferent to the individual moving through it.
Then comes “furious rhythm,” a phrase that refuses the romance of urban bustle. Rhythm is usually the comforting proof of pattern; Lorca turns it into assault. The traveler doesn’t simply observe tempo, they’re captured by it, conscripted into a pulse that has no room for silence, grief, or slow thought. The city’s music is percussive, not lyrical.
“Geometry and anguish” is the kill shot: clean lines, right angles, grids - paired with a raw, bodily emotion. The subtext is that modernity’s most confident aesthetic (order, design, rational planning) doesn’t eliminate suffering; it produces a new kind of it. Geometry becomes a mood. Anguish becomes infrastructure.
Context sharpens the critique. Lorca’s New York experience during the late 1920s, amid skyscrapers, racial violence, and the looming crash, informed Poet in New York, where modern progress reads as spiritual deprivation. He captures the city’s genius and its cruelty in a single compressed image: a place built to dazzle, powered by a rhythm that leaves the human heart lagging behind.
Then comes “furious rhythm,” a phrase that refuses the romance of urban bustle. Rhythm is usually the comforting proof of pattern; Lorca turns it into assault. The traveler doesn’t simply observe tempo, they’re captured by it, conscripted into a pulse that has no room for silence, grief, or slow thought. The city’s music is percussive, not lyrical.
“Geometry and anguish” is the kill shot: clean lines, right angles, grids - paired with a raw, bodily emotion. The subtext is that modernity’s most confident aesthetic (order, design, rational planning) doesn’t eliminate suffering; it produces a new kind of it. Geometry becomes a mood. Anguish becomes infrastructure.
Context sharpens the critique. Lorca’s New York experience during the late 1920s, amid skyscrapers, racial violence, and the looming crash, informed Poet in New York, where modern progress reads as spiritual deprivation. He captures the city’s genius and its cruelty in a single compressed image: a place built to dazzle, powered by a rhythm that leaves the human heart lagging behind.
Quote Details
| Topic | Travel |
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