At a crossroads in the lonely road that wends its way through the bleak, dusty expanse of the desert, a battered signpost wearily sticks out two decrepit fingers. The one, pointing straight and sure, leads to the sea; that glittering realm of purity and deception where soaring birds call their sorrows to the unyielding glare of the sky. That way, at least for now, is closed to me. My eyes skip, longingly but tentatively, along the sandy road, always shying short of the deep blue vastness. Instead, they turn back to the other fork in the road.

Under a layer of grime deposited over a thousand sandstorms, the sign is hard to read, as if loath to share the knowledge it carries. Upon approach, however, it grudgingly yields its closely guarded secret. Peering carefully at the simple font, one can make out the simple inscription "The City". And it is to the City I must journey, that Metropolis of steel and silence that is cold to the heart despite, or maybe due to, the empty cries emanating from every faceless street corner.

There it is that the racket reaches such a volume that all meaning previously discernible to the human ear becomes intangible and drifts away like the fading shreds of a forgotten dream. There it is that a man can find the greatest form of solitude possible in the modern world, wearing acquaintances like harlequins' masks but never letting anything penetrate through the first protective layer. There it is, though, that the greatest desire of humanity can come close to fulfillment - the desire to embrace emptiness until the mind is at last a part of nothing. There it is that emotion can be dispensed of in the soulless drift between days; in the empty choices between trifling activities; in the lack of history or culture that epitomizes the machine that the City has become.

Perversity, we shall say, or some other obscurity of the human condition, brings our race to its' sacrifice at the feet of the only gods that are left. Violence and emptiness; steel and stone: the bleak beings that subvert us. I was born in the city, drinking deeply from the cup of peace. When I grew old, the poison of dull pain lacing the cup was revealed to my eyes, and I would have cried were I not denied even that escape. The methods of our gods are cruel. Amidst half-sentient smog can be observed myriad horrors: the lament of starving mothers; the paupers' weary call; the old aged beset by arthritis and the attentions of black-booted thugs; the flower gardens of our youth, bricked over by grey concrete. None of these touch us.

Apathy, it seems, has conspired with our tendency to emptiness to suppress our conception of justice. Each in our separate units, we sit with scanty feet of walls between us, never interacting. For these walls are nothing compared to the true walls that keep us apart. Whole communities grow clustered like cancers on the skin of the City and yet within these communities all people are alone. We are stone. Changing slowly, if at all, our surface sheds coatings of dust as we brush off each new acquaintance. Nothing may be permitted to penetrate the sacred interior of hardened, empty stone.

I hate the City. I hate the City, but always, drawn on by some nameless drive, I make the same pilgrimage to the Mecca of the modern world. There is a desert in my heart, and my mind worships at the temple of solitude. The true desert is not that vista of blowing sand under a golden sun. Too much beauty exists in that open place. The true desert is the City. Bereft of all beauty save that of human suffering, the City has become a mechanical animal existing only to exist and to churn out reams of polluting black smog.