Chapter 04: Cities and Names 01

In this city, names are plentiful. Some deal with rocks and plants and more; others contain numbers, and they all had names when they were still alive. They will also have names when they are left behind, and we will want to remember them.

Whether we would want to leave names for places we hadn't visited is a different story. Some are utterly foreign to us, and others are our neighborhoods now, so you can see how names go out of mind, and out of the city. This might not be a bad thing, though, since there will come a time when we won't need names anymore. But city dwellers have a habit of filling cities with place names, places whose existence is left unexplained by the purpose of buildings or purposes of streets. There are names to warn off animals, names to shame some pimp, names to scare off unwary residents, names to christen graveyards. City planners call this place-making, and people agree that the process is necessary and that it is good to name things because it makes them real. One might argue that it's too late to do away with names since cities will keep them for themselves.