London

You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life…

-Samuel Johnson

This city gets into you like a shiver, like a sip of aged single-malt in chilling weather, like a caffeine-and-adrenaline rush. I still need to exercise my ability to express with words what happens to me in London. It’s not an easy feat. Up to now I’m reduced to commonplaces and monosyllables: the place is absolutely possessed by beauty. It’s not, of course, limited to its architecture, its labyrinthine narrow streets and its legendary, name-haunted buildings. It’s the people of London, people from all over the world who roam its streets and inhabit its spaces, each and every one contributing to the almost maddening beauty of its diverse complexity. London is still, also, the city of Blake, Marx & Engels, Dickens, Conan Doyle, Wilde, Woolf and Eliot, but it’s not only defined by its marks of weakness and of woe: there is a strange form of optimism here, a joie de vivre so to speak: the desire to live beautifully.

—

A veces pienso que en la vida, hay que atravesar la oscuridad para intuir la claridad, pelear contra los demonios y dejar que las altas temperaturas de las brazas del infierno fundan al corazón cerrado a doble llave, sellado.

-Miriam Jerade