The city, a narrow band of buildings, is tightly enclosed by steep, ridged hills, with Sololaki, the old Armenian quarter, lying in the neat right angle formed by the confluence of two of these. This constitutes the city's south-eastern district, lying on the edge of its medieval settlement and at the eastern end of the main thoroughfare of Rustaveli Avenue. The latter runs in rough parallel to the Mtqari, the city's river, which is spanned by three central bridges: the Mtekhi, the Baratishvili and the Chugereti. Beyond the middle one of these, on the left bank of the river, lies the district of Alvabari, where two of the city's most recent architectural additions are to be found: the cathedral of Sameba, the largest church in the country, and the presidential palace, a kind of low-budget Reichstag, Beyond them the ground rises again to the city's northern hills, surmounted by ranks of Soviet tower block settlements.
It is remarkable how undeveloped the city still remains beyond its main thoroughfare. A street or two up from Rustaveli and one might be in a provincial town; a street or two more and one might be in a rural village: it still has that air of langour, of stasis, and of quiet, crumbling decay. The abruptness of the surrounding slopes means that the houses come to an end very suddenly, and nature, at least in the form of the wooded scrubland that climbs up the side of the hill, makes its presence clearly felt. Beyond the Pantheon and the church of Mtatsminda, the route up the southern slope peters out into an earthen track, in places precipitously steep and worn away by landslides. Elsewhere it is interrupted by concrete steps, broken and ruined by countless rivulets of water pouring off the upper plateau. The cable car station at the bottom of the hill is undergoing restoration, as is its terminus and park at the top, and will, supposedly, be operational in a few months' time. But this interstitial area, too steep to build on, remains semi-wild, an indice of the modern city's precarious foothold on the land it covers; and to it has been confined the city's refuse, both in the form of popular, semi-pagan practices that surround the shrine and in the existence of stray dogs, who accompanied me in m climb up the hill (only to turn off at one point and later reappear: they knew a short cut that I did not).
One effect of the now widespread renovation is the fencing off of buildings and areas that formerly you were free to walk around, a kind of surreptitious enclosure of the commons, since you strongly suspect that once the fences are removed, access will no longer be as free as it once was. You will have to pay for the cable car and the amusement park; you will no longer be free to walk on the flower beds.
In an alley in the streets above the town you came upon a tiny and frail kitten - one of the tiniest and frailest you have ever seen. It looked at you with an expression not so much of fear but of jaded horror, as if, in its short life, it had already grown used to encountering only sources of terror. You feel you may have seen the same expression in certain children: it has a perverse affinity with a kind of continual wonderment at everything. This was most apparent in its eyes, which were yellow, albuminous and rheumy, and seemed on the point of dissolution and decay, of actually falling out of their sockets and sliding down its face, as if in recognition of how close it was to death, and of how its life were nothing more substantial than a breath of air, and as if decay were already composing itself within its living body, within the very eyes that gave the anguished expression of this life, for the moment that it would be extinguished.
Mann's Doctor Faustus might become acceptable as a work of literature once one takes it as a series of reflective essays cast in novelistic form. There is no inherent reason why the novel shouldn't be given this function. One need also accept that it is a novel about modernism, about the experience of its birth - at least in music - rather than itself modernist. This may well prove true of all Mann's work, who like Rilke was born (1875) a little too early to participate fully in the movement, though young enough to be present at its birth. Mann becomes a kind of Moses, who sees the promised land but is unable to enter it. His novels take the only alternative open to realist fiction if it is to retain serious ambitions for itself: they turn into essays.
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