Is Vienna the most civilized city in the world? Surely. Vienna is almost what we mean when we say civilized - clean, competent, aloof. Haughty. Richly layered but not gross or vulgar. There's schlock and depravity abroad, probably, but it would seem to be well cordoned-off and subject to sufficiently prohibitive disapprobation. In the park there's a statue of Strauss. Handel is played in the open-air Christmas markets. Beethoven and Brahms were buried here, as was Mozart (twice). The influence of Klimt and his Secessionists is all over. There's cappucino and sachertorte at the Cafe Eiles behind the Rathaus, and down past the Staatsoper, there's Wilhelm, Jungmann & Neffe, tailors to the Imperial and Royal Austrian Court since 1881. O Luxury! O Propriety! O Worldly Refinement!
Well, ok. Normally this is where I'd go all English major and begin to problematize, contextualize, qualify, hedge and second-guess. But nuts to that. Who has the energy? And besides, I really mean it, I like this place and I wish I were a part of it. With due respect to my otherwise innocent parents, I wish in every way that I were a different sort of creature, more Germanic, not subject to the dictates of these milky, broke-down Irish genes of mine. If I could be anybody, I'd be one of these stolid, literal-minded industrialists, I'd be some financial bureaucrat, or engineer, or Austrian economist: fat, straightforward, healthy, bearded, bald, respectable and overeducated, square of jaw, shoulder and soul. Untroubled by any useless sense of mystery, any sense of sin or surpassing purpose. I'd have my lusts and duties, and I'd feel at home in the world. In the processes of computation that would fill my days.
O functionality. O stone and logic. O Vienna.
