San Francisco Is a Concentration Field.
A short essay on the curious, embarrassing usefulness of being in the same room as people who are quietly trying to outwork you.
I moved to San Francisco in the late autumn of last year, with two suitcases, a portrait of myself in a tuxedo (about which I will say nothing further, on legal advice), and the slightly bruised conviction — held against the run of contemporary opinion — that geography still mattered. I was, on the day of the flight, in a minority. The internet, I had been told repeatedly, made cities obsolete. One could, in principle, do anything from anywhere. The men who had told me this were, almost without exception, doing it from a small flat in a place that had, in the years since they had left it, slowly stopped mattering.
I did not say this to them, because one is, on the whole, polite. I went anyway.
The thing nobody mentions in the brochures.
The thing nobody mentions in the brochures, because it does not, on the page, sound flattering, is that San Francisco is largely full of people who are not particularly enjoying themselves. They are, instead, working. They are working, by and large, on things which an outside observer would consider, at best, eccentric. They are working on Saturdays. They are working on what their mothers, on the phone, refer to with a slightly worried inflection as that thing. They are tired. They are, when you sit with them long enough, very funny about being tired.
I had not expected this. I had expected — having read, like everybody, too many breathless articles — a city of swagger. What I found instead was a city of quiet, slightly self-deprecating exhaustion, in which, on a given Tuesday at half past nine in the evening, an enormous number of people were doing, with a kind of grim cheerfulness, the most boring small piece of work in the world.
The boring small piece of work was, on closer inspection, not boring at all. It was the precise twenty-minute task which, performed for a year, separated a successful product from a failed one. They had, almost without exception, come to it the same way: by sitting next to somebody, in the previous twelve months, who was also doing the boring small piece of work. They had, in short, caught it.
The catching.
I want to dwell on the catching, because I think it is the thing that those of us who left other cities in order to come to this one are, mostly, paying for.
It is not, despite the brochure language, the network. The network is, on the whole, a slightly pompous concept which has the misfortune of being mostly true. It is also not the events, which are, in fact, largely tedious, and which one stops attending after the third week. It is something subtler, and quieter, and rather more like the thing my piano teacher — Mrs Aldous, of whom I have, lately, been thinking a great deal — used to call the room you practise in.
Mrs Aldous believed, with the faintly mystical conviction of a woman who had taught nine-year-olds for forty-three years, that one became, over time, the room one practised in. If one practised in a small bright room with a window onto a garden, one would, eventually, play in the manner of a small bright room. If one practised in a damp basement with a flickering bulb, one would play in the manner of the basement. The piano, she said, was almost beside the point. It is the room, dear, that matters most.
San Francisco, I have come to think, is the room. It is not — God knows — bright. It smells, in places, of a great many things one would prefer it did not smell of. The bulb, in some neighbourhoods, flickers. But it is, in the particular sense Mrs Aldous meant, a room in which a great many people are, very seriously, doing the boring small piece of work. One catches it. One does not, in the catching, become a different person. One simply becomes, by small increments, the person one already half was.
An admission.
I am aware that this is not the fashionable position. The fashionable position, at present, is that geography is dead, that the talent has gone elsewhere, that San Francisco is — in the slightly funereal phrase one keeps reading — over. I have noticed, however, that the people who say this most loudly are, almost invariably, not in any particular hurry to move here. They are, instead, in Lisbon. Or in Austin. Or in a small, charming, faintly underemployed corner of Mexico City.
I am sure they are, in their respective rooms, very happy. I do not, especially, want to take their happiness from them. I would, however, gently note that the rooms they are in are not, on the whole, the rooms in which the boring small piece of work is currently being done. They are, in many cases, the rooms in which the boring small piece of work was done five years ago, by people who have since moved on.
Mrs Aldous, were she alive, would, I think, raise an eyebrow, and ask whether one had, in fact, practised that morning. The honest answer, on most mornings, is yes. I have practised. The room has helped. I would, on the whole, recommend it, although I admit it is not for everyone, and the rent is appalling.
— B.