Charles Dickens

The Colombian city of Medellín is still shaking off its bad reputation.  In the 1980s, while serving as global capital to the cocaine trade, it had one of the highest homicide rates in the world and was also home to one of the most notorious (and richest) men, Pablo Escobar.  The ubiquitous nature of brutality helped give it the nickname “City of Eternal Violence”.   But a series of positive turns—including the death of Escobar in 1993 and the demobilization of urban militias between 2003 and 2006—has helped return Medellín to stability and even vibrance.  Today Medellín is better known by another (and older) nickname, "City of Eternal Spring," which reflects its mild climate and beautiful natural setting.

Few visitors to Medellín these days will witness violence during their stay.  Some, however, may wish to see the Cementerio de San Pedro, where this photo was taken.  Established in 1842, it’s statuary and tombstones are elaborate and often provocative.  High walls muffle the noise of city traffic and foster a sense of serenity.  Death itself even seems far away, at least its violent forms.

In the quote I used last week from A Tale of Two Cities, the following, more somber lines came immediately afterwards:

Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this.  No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all.  No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged.  It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page.  It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on its shore.  My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life’s end.  In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?

Stretched out at an elevation of 8600 feet and home to some eight million people, Colombia's capital Bogotá is best seen in its entirety from Monserrate, a 10,300-foot peak located on the city’s east side.  I use the word “entirety” loosely however, because I’m not sure we see anything—including Bogotá from a mountaintop—in its entirety.

I arrived at Monserrate at 4:00 p.m. and would stay till after six so that I could watch night fall on the city.  This would also give me the opportunity to descend, through darkness, back into Bogotá aboard a cable car, peering through a glass window at the city drawing nearer.  If I recall correctly, this was the first time I’d been on a cable car at night.  Suspended in darkness you see clearly how many things about the world are actually hidden.  Even the handful of passengers in the cable car were but whispering shadows and silhouettes to one another.

In Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, a character makes an observation that one could also make as he descends toward a city in an unlit cable car:

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.  A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!

We err in assuming that we know all there is to know about someone.  Sometimes we err even in assuming we know half of what there is to know.  I often think this when I watch news pundits speak with false authority about people who live in and are shaped by places that the pundit has never been.  But sometimes I think it about myself too, not least when I'm gliding through darkness surrounded by silhouettes, approaching a city whose language I do not speak and in which I'll spend so little time.