city as (not too literal) metaphor
I went to see "The Eternal Sunshine Whatever Whatever" last night, and we had extra time between dinner and the movie, so we walked around the neighborhood for a while. The theater, which itself is pretty new, is in a part of the city near Metro Center that's being redeveloped at an unbelievably quick pace -- new buildings in; abandoned buildings out -- so naturally there's a lot of construction.

On F Street, in the middle of the block, there are these old facades of buildings that are being preserved. They're very cool-looking: rows of pillars, beautiful old stone and brick, old-fashioned lettering on the signs. Masons and carvers made the fronts of banks and federal buildings and whatever else beautiful during a time when the fronts of buildings were naturally beautiful, I guess, because every one had to be done by hand, so it wasn't cheaper and more expedient to make things homogeneously ugly the way it is now. I like that the facades will stay -- the metaphor isn't about how surface-level beauty is overly important or anything.

But the insides of the buildings aren't useful or structurally sound or whatever, and they're all totally knocked out, so the facades stand in front of huge pits of rubble. They're supported only by scaffolding. It doesn't look too sturdy. The doorways and the windows just lead to the space where the substance of the buildings used to be; you could see the empty sky through them last night.

And I feel just like that. We all hang on so narrowly.