Leaving Sheffield

When I got to Quito, Ecuador in 1996, I hated it.  HATED it.  It was my first experience in a 3rd world city, and it was busy, maddening, crowded, unkempt, and dirty.  Thick pollution everywhere.  It had no mass transit system beyond buses that still used leaded gasoline.  So the busy streets would be filled with heavy black exhaust smoke that turned your collar, canvas bag, and mucus a dark grey.  God knows what it was doing to your lungs.

And then when I was leaving 10 months later, I remember walking the streets of the beautiful, appealing, lively Quito I had come to know at love.  The steep, hilly streets had charm, the neighborhoods had a raw aliveness that I had never known in the states.  I don't know when it happened, but the city turned itself inside out until it was one of my favorite places that I didn't want to leave.

This happens to me all the time.  I hated college for my first year and a half, and when I graduated I loved it so much I wouldn't have traded it for any school in the world.  When I first got to Tanzania I realized that there’s a third world in the third world, and I was in a place far poorer than Ecuador.  I was out of place, overwhelmed, overheated, and resisting everything.  And when I left ten months later I cried as if I was leaving a family member.

And now I'm leaving Sheffield.  When I first got here it was a grey, dull, failed industrial town with no charm.  It was overcast all the time, it had none of the beautiful architecture of Bath, it had none of the culture of London, and it claimed Def Leppard as one of its sons.  But now, 15 weeks later, I’m leaving a city I love.  The streets are home, the industrial sectors have their own gritty style, and the whole town exudes the pride of a post-industrial survivor.  I spent 4 hours today in my U.K. hometown trying to find a t-shirt that said Sheffield on it.  (They don't exist.  I had to settle for a mug.)  Sheffield, now, to me, is beautiful.

So is Sheffield objectively beautiful or not?  For me it wasn't and then it was, even though none of the concrete details changed.  Is beauty only a subjective thing?  Does such subjectivity mean it can subjectively change within an individual mind?  If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then how do you explain the "beholder" finding something ugly and then beautiful?  Do we have any control over this?  Could I have worked hard to see the beauty in Sheffield when I first arrived?  Or do I have no agency over these perceptions of beauty?  If beauty is up for grabs in my capricious mind and a city can transmute from ugly to beautiful (and maybe back again), then is anything actually beautiful "out there" outside of our own heads?

Sigh.  Questions for another day I suppose.  Back to leaving Sheffield.

When I first heard I was placed in Sheffield, I felt the acute loss of London, where I originally thought I would be.  And London is great--undoubtedly one of the premier cities in the world.  There's ALWAYS something happening that you're dying to see.  I'm here in the U.K. to study a very narrow field of academia and education (teaching ethics to high school students), and even within such narrowness London had something related happening all the time:  a conference one day, a lecture the next, a class the following day, etc.  I once planned to be there for just a couple of days, but then kept adding days because I there as always something else to see.  You never leave London because you're done with it:  you have to just abandon it and miss the rest of the goings on.

And yet, and yet.  London is a tourist’s paradise.  I would conjecture that Big Ben is the most photographed thing in the world on any given day—the city is awash in foreigners, and many of them are in front of Big Ben clicking away.  The Tate Modern, The Eye, the National Theatre, St. Paul's Cathedral, the Tower of London, the Globe Theater--you could spend a month there on these tourist traps alone.  As great as these places might be, isn't there's always something a little flat, a little dead, a little over about these places?  As always, David Foster Wallace said it better than any other human possibly could.  After attending the Maine Lobster Festival, he muses:

“To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience, It is to impose yourself on places that in all non-economic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.”

So no, I didn't live in London.  I never went in The Eye, never went to St. Paul's Cathedral.  Never saw a Premier League game, never took a boat down the Thames.  I wasn't opposed to doing any of those things, I was just in Sheffield at the time.  And when I find myself regretting that I missed those classic London experiences, I'm consoled by the fact that I was in Sheffield, a very real place that was just going about its business, and I happened to be there.  I hardly heard another American accent the whole time I was here.  The British Rough Guide is 1,000 pages long, and it devotes exactly two pages to Sheffield, even though it's the 5th biggest city in England.  Sheffield was a better, realer place than London would have been.

And I can't tell if this is selfish or affectionate, but in an important way Sheffield is mine.  The Globe Theater is everyone's, but Carl at The Last Chapter bookstore on Rustling's road is mine, and I got to talk to him most every day.  The grey skies, the abandoned foundries, the losing records of the soccer teams, all mine.

Why do we love the scarred and the skewed so much?  Why is the bastard child on Game of Thrones our favorite son?  Why will I leave with more pride about being a temporary Sheffieldian than if I had been a temporary Londoner?  Who knows.  But when something is yours and you commit to it, it becomes inevitable and inextricable.  It’s the way of a parent’s particular love for their children, as described by Andrew Solomon:

"But why does any of us prefer our own children, all of them defective in some regard, to others real or imagined?  If some glorious angel descended into my living room and offered to exchange my children for other, better children--brighter, kinder, funnier, more loving, more disciplined, more accomplished--I would clutch the ones I have and, like most parents, pray away the atrocious specter."