I find my thinking keeps returning to the theme of maturity. My guess is that I'll talk about it more, in this blog.
There's a scene in Jurassic Park where the scientists look down the hill at a large water hold, with various dinosaurs clustered around it. I'm doing this from memory, but I think there are apatosauri at the waters edge, pteradactyls flocking above, and smaller dinos moving between the larger ones.
The scene has always struck me. In the movie, it stands out as one of the few times you see the dinosaurs *not* interacting with people. It's fiction, of course, but it represents a mature ecosystem: an example of an environment in which the various niches are filled by interacting species. There's a beauty to mature environment: unlike incomplete or unstable system, every part of mature system presumably fills a needed purpose. In a game theoretic sense, mature ecosystems are at equilibrium; that is, they won't change unless an outside factor makes the system unstable.
For the record, I'm leaving a lot out, and totally ignoring chaos/complexity theory, and theories of punctuated evolution.
So why have I titled this "The Mature City"? Because when I look at New York City, outside my door, I see a mature ecosystem. Every freakish, sometimes disgusting, part of the city serves a purpose. Millions of organism interact in an apparently chaotic fashion, and somehow it all works.
There's a real beauty to it. I feel like I'm looking at the product of a golden age. Something like New York can only exist during one of history's peaks. A system this complex is extremely vulnerable to external factors.
Like that scene in Jurassic Park, New York is a moment in time, one that can't last. I'm amazed to be here.
Adam