Cities with history: a blessing and a burden.

One of the things that I found interesting about Americans was their obsession with History and, in general, cities (and peoples) with a History behind them. I suppose it makes sense coming from a relatively young nation. Gibson puts it in the mouth of Kumiko when she is pondering about London:

This was nothing like Tokyo, where the past, all that remained of it, was nurtured with a nervous care. History there had become a quantity, a rare thing, parcelled out by government and preserved by law and corporate funding. Here it seemed the very fabric of things, as if the city were a single growth of stone and brick, uncounted strata of message and meaning, age upon age, generated over the centuries to the dictates of some now all but unreadable DNA of commerce and empire.

(Gibson: pp. 11-12)

To be clear, living in a society with deep roots in the past is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it provides some sort of default identity, something to hang onto when one feels disoriented. But, on the other, it often feels oppressive, like a heavy weight upon one's shoulders, a common set of assumptions about what one should think, how one should behave, what one should like and dislike. In this sense, American cities have it easy: they can redefine themselves without fear. They can look into the future without a need to worry about the connections to their "true self", their "real identity". American cities —American society in general— are naturally postmodern. They don't have an identity set in stone. On the contrary, they get to choose their own identity.