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  1. Nov 2022
    1. The mythical city of Babel. Or any one story about the mythical city of Babel, or any story about a great lost city with a single language. The actual story of Babel is an origin story, a civilization’s creation myth, the loss and fracture of a dream that leads to a rebuilding that leads to the known world. Lots of cultures have some kind of myth like this, but what has always struck me about this one in particular is the open-mouthed longing its premise instantly compels: The whole world, speaking the same language. All at once the unknown made known, the twisting roads made navigable, and every stranger made into a friend. This dream is the same one that every lonely misfit growing up without friends or supportive family clings to when they survive their childhood by imagining that one day they will move to the city—whatever specific city that constitutes—and everything will be better, and everyone there will understand. That city is always a fiction, and always an invention, even when the kid really does move to the city and everyone there really does understand. Every place we love is a fiction, and so is every story we come up with about why we love it, or why we’re there, or what the city made possible, and what it gave us. An old friend of mine was once asked how she knew a mutual friend and, awkwardly avoiding the real answer, which was that they used to have sex, said “we know each other from the city.” Of course, how they really knew each other, before the sex, was from social media. But either way “we know each other from the city” seems all too accurate a way to say it. Twitter was the city and we all knew each other from the city. All of us on here lived for a while in the city of Babel, miraculously speaking one another’s language, the previous barriers that had kept us from connection removed, building marketplaces and town squares, and dark underground bars and fancy restaurants, building palaces and gardens and amphitheaters and houses and bedrooms and lecture halls and printing presses and offices. We all lived here in the city together, running into old friends and making friends with strangers on the walk to the grocery store and the train to work, eavesdropping on heartbreaks, and getting into arguments, and dodging the wild-eyed preachers screaming about the end of the world. Before I got on Twitter, I had always felt like I somehow never learned the language by which people were able to talk to one another, and make friends, and be in social spaces together, and know one another. And then, for a few years when the whole world was text, I suddenly had those skills, and I have to tell you, for a little while it really, truly felt like I would never be lonely again. I know that’s stupid. Of course it is. Anything anyone believes in with their whole heart is stupid; the drunk girls in the bathroom don’t actually have the key to all mythologies. But Twitter allowed me to enter the world, because it rendered the world into text, and in that form I had an all-at-once fluency in things that had been previously out of reach. It was a city and I made a home in it, and now that city is gone.Perhaps the myth of Babel offers a simpler truth: Cities live for a while and then they die. The spaces we inhabit blossom and decay, much like our own bodies that we place within them. We build something and it lasts until it doesn’t; we live our lives somewhere and no part of our experience exists beyond its borders, and then one day it’s gone, and persists only in our fractured, once-shared memories. Cities rise and fall; they are as easy to lose as any other type of love. We love things, and then something else happens. We live somewhere, and then no one lives there. The sand picks up the ruins and disfigures them, and the traces left behind look like not so much a record as a joke, sweeping away whatever seemed most permanent. Again and again we get the idea of permanence wrong: We think it means whatever matters most, when in fact it means nothing of the kind. But to engage against all our better instincts in that belief is what it is to love. These spaces were always temporary and always doomed; we behaved in them as though they would last not because we had any good reason to believe they would, but because we loved them, and because love became possible within them. If Twitter was ever utopian or even good or pleasant for any of its users, it certainly isn’t now, and likely wasn’t ever any of those things. I don’t mean to imply that it is, or even that it once was. I mean that I once thought it was, which is the difference between love and reality. Once I lived in a city, and in that city everyone could miraculously talk to one another, and then we couldn’t, or maybe had to admit that we never had been able to, and then one day the city was gone.

      THANK YOU and thank god there was someone far more adept at referencing this Bible story than I. Was starting to get semi-legit worried.