The T rattled down Beacon Street, that electrical whirr driving into a higher pitch as it accelerated. With a clatter and a dinging of its bell it slowed and then stopped: the lurching progress of the train when it is above ground in Boston. The driver, an ideal Beantown specimen accent and all, rocked backwards and forwards with the motion of the train. The train slowed again, the bell ringing, pausing at a light and then, at slow speed began to inch forward.

I was seated facing front, close enough to see through the windscreen. I watched the train’s progress and then I saw a young guy, probably a BU student, pause and then step across the tracks. The train squealed to a halt and the driver simultaneously hit the bell and the horn, and strangely undeterred, I saw the guy pause and stare at the train. He stepped forward, finishing his crossing. The driver in that sharp accent, an accent that anyone outside of situ would call a caricature, leaned out and barked “what the fuck is wrong with you?! I got the right-a-way, I’m a fuckin’ locomotive!” With that the train sped on rapidly, bell and horn blazing through the mid-morning sun. For me, that moment is Boston

I both love and fear the audacity of cities.

I look back at that moment in Boston and it encapsulates that audacity. There is, of course, the audacity of that young man, staring down the train that came very close to breaking him to pieces like Carker in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son. But I also look at the audacity of the T: the audacity of sending those tons of metal rolling down those tracks. I bring up Dickens, because Dickens is a writer who understands both the glorious and hellish idea of cities as an ever evolving expression of humanity’s growth and change. Take for instance the squalor of the tenement called Tom-All-Alone’s in Bleak House, or the bureaucratic nightmare that is London in Little Dorritt. However, I’d like to dwell on the train for a moment as an emblem of that same audacity, that courage and defiance that prompts us build skyscrapers and monuments.

In chapter 6 of Dombey and Son Dickens describes Stagg’s Gardens a neighborhood in North London:

The first shock of a great earthquake had, just at that period, rent the whole neighbourhood to its centre. Traces of its course were visible on every side. Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped by great beams of wood. Here, a chaos of carts, overthrown and jumbled together, lay topsy- turvy at the bottom of a steep unnatural hill; there, confused treasures of iron soaked and rusted in something that had accidentally become a pond. Everywhere were bridges that led nowhere; thoroughfares that were wholly impassable; Babel towers of chimneys, wanting half their height; temporary wooden houses and enclosures, in the most unlikely situations; carcases of ragged tenements, and fragments of unfinished walls and arches, and piles of scaffolding, and wildernesses of bricks, and giant forms of cranes, and tripods straddling above nothing. There were a hundred thousand shapes and substances of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down, burrowing in the earth, aspiring in the air, mouldering in the water, and unintelligible as any dream. Hot springs and fiery eruptions, the usual attendants upon earthquakes, lent their contributions of confusion to the scene. Boiling water hissed and heaved within dilapidated walls; whence, also, the glare and roar of flames came issuing forth; and mounds of ashes blocked up rights of way, and wholly changed the law and custom of the neighbourhood.

Camden Town is decimated it seems. Some great cataclysm has struck and now the very fires from the bowls of the earth (or hell itself) seem to crackle upwards through the rents in the ground. It is a scene from a war movie or a disaster film. And only after this description of violence and upheavel does Dickens, quite concisely, tell us the cause: “In short, the yet unfinished and unopened Railroad was in progress; and, from the very core of all this dire disorder, trailed smoothly away, upon its mighty course of civilisation and improvement.”

I turn to the railroad here not just because subways run through many of our great cities, and are in many ways a great achievement in urban living, but because the train in general whether it is the New York City Subway, the London Underground, the MBTA or the Amtrak, shares the same audacity of the city, the audacity that seeks to impose “civilization and improvement” upon all it touches.

The audacity of the city is ultimately part of the long line of shifts that human beings have made in relation to the natural world. Often we think back to the state of nature with a kind of wistful glee (when not contemplating Hobbes argument that life in such a state was “nasty, brutish, and short.”) But it remains to be seen how long we were actually involved been in some kind of pure state of nature, or precisely what that means. We have been changing our relationship to nature at least since we started cooking our food. Cities and subways, long-distance rail travel, and 747s are products of the continual evolutions and reactions fueled by the kind of necessity, desire, and hubris that led us to redefine our relationship to the natural world (by which I mean the world that is not us) by making and using tools.

As I have said, I love and fear the audacity of cities. Boston’s John Hancock Tower is an astonishing thing. The MBTA for all of the complaints I have had about it (and there have been many) is indispensable for millions of Bostonians. The way in which giant communities, the likes of which our ancestors would never have dreamed of, can weave themselves together and sometimes live in relative peace is mind-boggling. And yet sometimes I think back to that T driver yelling at the foolish, but weirdly brave young man, and I wonder precisely why the hell does that train have the right of way.