At the beginning of the chapter I read, Carl Abbott puts up with a question—what is gained and what is lost when a city pulls up stakes? This profound question arouses my interest. Whereas, since a “moving city” has already existed in science fictions for centuries but still not common in the reality, maybe the latter is more worth thinking about.
So, what is lost, or in another word, what inconvenience it has when embodying mobility?
The first thing that comes to my mind is extra energy consumption and the limit of current technology. This is an easy-thinking point but also an intricate problem to solve. Because moving such a large thing like a city requires more efforts. If we cannot deal well with technology, most human and material resources will be paid without any reward.
Apart from the physical difficulty, the mental problem is also one of my perspectives. Let’s take train-like cities as an example. When we talk about “train”, what we will associate? Indeed, travelling. This is a stereotype. If we live in such a rail-riding city, we may always feel like travelling on the way. As we all know, we humans have a deep attachment to our homeland, to the land. As a consequence, when a city keeps moving, we may feel a sense of homeless and loneliness. It’s a kind of “vagrancy”. Without our destinations and fixed residences, we may lose our original hearts someday.
It reminds me of a Chinese novel called The Wandering Earth. I think maybe that is exactly the reason that the earth will search for a fixed place called “home”. Because wandering is never a living style for humans. Body and soul have to be united.
Eventually, when I closed the book, a sentence just jumped into my mind—“If no perched place heart, where are wandering.”
HU Yujie 3035771256
Enjoy how you pulled things you have read before to enrich your reflection. In fact, I feel that the train itself is home to the dwellers of the Snowpiercer. Why should home be rooted in a place that is fixed?