To Visit the City of the Dead

The strange thing about the city of the dead, my companion was telling me, is that there is only one way into it — well, there’s really two ways, if you want to be exact, but there’s only one way to do it on your own power. Through the front gate, that is. We were walking through the gate as he said this I was distracted by the statuary, by the crypts which situated like row houses in a wealthy neighborhood, Dutch-style townhouses, and by the cobblestone streets which had street signs and rain gutters and lampposts and long orderly sightlines, like those down the avenues of Paris, which radiate from the Arch d’Triomphe. So it truly is a city of the dead, I exclaimed, and then my companion explained that it really wasn’t anything too impressive, not compared to the cemetery reserved for the rich, the one most of the guidebooks to the city would suggest we really ought to be visiting, though it wasn’t so vast and intricate, it wasn’t, as this was, truly a city of the dead, and so in that sense I was right — only not right to be impressed by this gingerbread-fortress neighborhood of false upper-middle-class splendor, like a block of Edith Wharton’s Manhattan, which if I liked such things I’d really be much more taken with the cemetery reserved for the rich. <a href="https://medium.com/@jonathan.lethem/to-visit-the-city-of-the-dead-8bd2b4a5ebb3">Read More</a>