ENG 2150 Gimme Shelter: the spaces we live in

“The Metropolis and Mental Life,” by George Simmel demonstrates how urban life changes mental life. The read was a bit confusing but after hitting some of the main points in class, it may have cleared up my understanding. The transition between rural to urban life is rather substantial, where personal interactions become impersonal and where feeling and emotion turn intellectual. As discussed in class, intellectualization is when one blocks out emotion, turning to reason or logic, a way to basically remain blind to reality. The urban life is governed by the objective, where everything is fact, there is nothing personal, as opposed to the rural life, where the small town where one can be subjective, having some sort of personal interpretation or experience. Because we are so bound to the city life, and as Simmel suggested, we are more or less robotic, sustaining our subjective selves, running around like little puppets under money hungry capitalists (at least in today’s society), taking away from any individuality thats left in us.

“Life makes one blasé because it stimulates the nerves to their utmost reactivity until they finally can no longer produce any reaction at all,” (329). This is just another way of saying that things go unnoticed, that there is no indifference. This goes back to the fact that people in big cities are in fact “mathematical formulas.” You can’t change the formula because you won’t get the same output. This pertains to the individuals engulfed by the metropolis life; everything is calculated, or a better term, measurable; time is everything. We can’t do anything different than what we are used to doing, this daily robotic routine, because we need to produce money, it must be our product, we can’t change it because we need that output. It’s just all about money and time, therefore taking away any kind of value, meaning or reaction, making everything superficial.   Because we have no emotional response, or any kind of regard to something that’s out of the ordinary demonstrates there is no more qualitative value within the community, rather a move quantitative based setting, a money economy. Furthermore, Simmel says, “Money, with all its colorless and indifference quality, can become the common denominator of all values,” (330). Money is the motive, at least in the city it is.

“Everything (he kept saying) is something it isn’t. And everybody is always somewhere else. Maybe it was the city, being in the city, that made him feel how queer everything was and that it was something else. Maybe (he kept thinking) it was the names of the things. The names were tex and frequently koid. Or they were flex and oid or they were duroid (sani) or flexsan (duro), but everything was glass (but not quite glass) and the thing that you touched (the surface, washable, crease-resistant) was rubber, only it wasn’t quite rubber and you didn’t quite touch it but almost. The wall, which was glass but turned out on being approached not to be a wall, it was something else, it was an opening or doorway–and the doorway (through which he saw himself approaching) turned out to be something else, it was a wall. And what he had eaten not having agreed with him.”
(E. B. White, The Door, 1939)

I am indeed always thinking about my conscious and did always realize how one thought became another. The transitions so subtle that we don’t notice the ongoing thought processes. I will literally stop and try track down how I got from thinking about tanning to the cookie monster (“Oh I look so dark, the sand is so hot and lucky to be under the sun all the time, at least sand can’t get fat, look at me, ew, it’s the chocolate chip cookies, oh remember the cookie monster from sesame street, yes, they made it the veggie monster now for a reason!). That’s probably what I would stir up if I were laying under the sun in Florida! Well that’s what minds do. We see that in the short passage above, how ones imagination is in fact always building on and on. The mind is constantly stirring up something up, an emotion, and observation, etc. We can see that in the passage, he is jumping from one idea to another. First he is thinking about the city, and then he connects it to names, consequently thinks about different names, onto rubber and so forth. It is all his perception and his way of identifying.

The way we identify things, or the way we perceive them, is what makes everyone’s conscious special. As William James also tries to explain, these thoughts are always personal. Our conscious creates our experience; it’s personal. This is what makes our experiences unique. I may look at a table just think oh it needs to be cleaned, there are crumbs, whereas my sister will look at it and just think yes, there’s the table, I can sit and do homework. We both see a table but think different things. One may block out everything they see, and just focus on one thing that is meaningful to him or her and build on from there. Thoughts shape our experiences and our experiences may also shape them.