Disturbia

Epilogue

TAKEN FROM the foreword of City of Night and Day by Vincent Reynolds.

London has changed. Now it is a city built on sand, shifting and eliding into a thousand different lifestyles – ghost-images transmitted through interference. Its residents are finally free to plot a course through the maze of glass and steel and flesh, to locate the coordinates of their dream lives and exist within them. And like waters running over sand, strange new tributaries grow and die with the speed of rolling clouds. The social classes once deemed so necessary to maintain the land's financial structure are being replaced by tribal cults.

London 's architecture has been freed of religious significance, its pagan influences purged, its Mycenean alignments to moon and stars forgotten, Solomon, Boudicea, Blake and Hawksmoor no longer forces to be reckoned with. Now it is styled on sterile American lines, freed from the weight of the past.

London is no longer a city of formalities. Its institutions are falling, its stock exchange no longer a closed shop, its companies no longer tradition-bound, its employees loyal to none but themselves, its intentions no longer honourable. The agreements that existed within a handshake, like the silk top hats of the city, have vanished. The tailored suits were too restricting, too earthbound; flight requires freedom.

Once I referred to London as a slumbering giant, but now the giants are gone and there are only people; people with the ability to redefine the power of this mighty city. Change, of course, is not absolute. Some old ways remain. Two thousand years of dreams live on in the shadows around us. It will take a clever man indeed to unite those ancient dreamscapes with our hopes for the future. To return Prometheus and Dionysus, Solomon and Boadicea, to return the pagan glory of the planets to our streets, to reforge our links with day and night, summer and winter, to bring back the sunlight of Helios and the moonglow of Diana into London lives. The dead hand of Christianity ultimately led us into darkness. Perhaps someone will be ruthless enough to lead us back out of it, and into the light.