I was sitting on a couch in Los Angeles watching TV when my sister told me she felt like she was about to get run over by a car.
We had spent the day unsuccessfully navigating LA. Some guy told me to go fuck myself after holding up a turn lane on my bike for two lights. We drove to the wrong deli to meet my sister’s friend from college and her dog Blueberry planted itself firmly in the middle of almost every crosswalk we passed. We had set out with the goal of buying a U-lock, visiting the beach, taking my sister’s dog on a walk and catching up with her friend from college.
We returned having spent hours in traffic exhausted and on edge. Given how attainable our goals were and how difficult it was for us to accomplish them, we both had the same question at the end of the day: Are we idiots?
After a brief debate, we concluded that we weren’t idiots and said that it was LA’s fault. We immediately began constructing an imaginary LA where we weren’t villains for cutting across six lanes of traffic to make an exit and where an overpass can magically tear through your house, separating your kitchen from your bedroom with two hundred feet of cement.
I started idly leafing through a copy of “Invisible Cities” looking for inspiration. “Invisible Cities” by Italo Calvino is a fictionalized conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, where Polo describes cities within Khan’s empire. Polo’s ability to capture the bizarre dream logic of these cities in prose is remarkable:
“Nothing exists or happens in the one Valdrada that the other Valdrada does not repeat, because the city was so constructed that its every point would be reflected in its mirror, and the Valdrada down in the water contains not only all the flutings and juttings of the facades that rise above the lake, but also the rooms interiors with ceilings and floors, the perspective of the halls, the mirrors and the wardrobes.”
What’s more fascinating than the cities themselves are how their imagined inhabitants respond to their environment:
“Valdrada’s inhabitants know that each of their actions is, at once, that action and its mirror image, which possesses the special dignity of images, and this awareness prevents them from succumbing for a single moment to chance and forgetfulness.”
People then construct their cities around these responses, and a never-ending loop is created with both parties molding until the two are indistinguishable from each other. Calvino makes this fact glaringly obvious by crafting elaborate magical cities that are constantly in dialogue with their inhabitants. Despite their strangeness, these cities remind you of somewhere you’ve been, or someone you’ve met or someone you used to know who completely changed after moving to a new city.
We decided that LA was organized around the highway’s imminent domain and that — because the highway has a mind of its own — every building and road was constantly scrambling to avoid it. Everyone is constantly scurrying around to find whoever or whatever they’ve lost in the shuffle of buildings. Everyone is always in the wrong lane or at the wrong deli because everything hops corners or flips sides every second of every day.
Because everyone’s in the wrong place, everyone is there at the wrong time. Everyone’s friends are always an hour late. Everyone invites you to move in with them after a date or leaves you languishing in their DMs for a month before they ask you out for a drink. Like the Valdradan inhabitants who never succumb to forgetfulness, this structure encourages Angelenos to do the exact opposite. They become notoriously late and forgetful.
Everyone in LA wants to leave, to untangle themselves from the bloodthirsty skein of cement, wrenching themselves free, escaping over the mountains. LA is abhorrent to those that can untangle the mess. Anyone who could systemize the shifting mess of the city is smart enough to leave after a couple of years.
LA itself has become a monument to defeat. Hollywood is notoriously difficult to break into and LA warning people not to come is a songwriting trope. “Midnight Train to Georgia” is all about leaving the city defeated, and so is “LA Freeway.” I think Guy Clarke was being literal when he wrote “if I could just get off of this LA freeway” because his exit was obfuscated by six lanes of thick, idiotic LA traffic.
We started talking about how everyone’s brains had to be just as horrifically disorganized and scrambled as the cities they live in. She told me I had become a space cadet since living in sleepy Claremont, where very little happens after 9 p.m. and my morning commute is a leisurely stroll across campus.
She told me I’d go completely nuts if I kept going on long hikes in the desert by myself and spending long hours in the library working on my thesis. I countered, saying her brain was probably morphing into some mutant reflection of LA if she kept it up, she’d be too neurotic to function by the time she was 30.
Despite how comically exaggerated our claims were, there was a genuine concern for how both of our environments are amplifying certain personality traits that could become limiting. It’s easy to attach a lot of romantic notions about a life of travel, but in a lot of cases it can feel like perpetually wading through LA traffic. This constant movement has become standard for ambitious 20-something year olds. My sister has moved from Tennessee to Michigan to Texas, and now, maybe to California in the span of a couple years.
Investing in community or relationships in a place you don’t plan on staying for too long can be incredibly difficult. We rob these places of their permanence, making them branches of the horrifyingly inescapable six lane highway. Given how much she’s constantly moving about, it makes sense that she constantly feels like she’s in the middle of a crosswalk and she needs to get out of someone’s way.
I think instead we should all take a page from my sister’s dog’s book. Everyone should find a place we like and lay down in the middle of it, even if it happens to be a crowded intersection. We should plant our feet in the middle of a crosswalk and say “fuck you, I’m sitting here” to whoever is dragging us around and whatever cars happen to be honking at us. This insistence in staying put will allow us to invest in wherever we happen to be, which will make it feel more like a home than an Airbnb or a highway.
Imagining the inhabitants of Valdrada whose habit is so radically formed by the magical reflection of their city makes us realize how profoundly spaces rewire us psychologically. Calvino asks us to imagine our surrounding community as a mirror to our mind. Realizing that your psyche and surroundings are always in step with each other is an incredibly motivating feeling because any kind of positive change in one will result in positive change in the other.
Liam Riley PO ’26 is from East Tennessee. He likes giving book recommendations, the outdoors and shenanigans. Reach out to him if you want to help build an underground sauna in his buddy’s backyard.