Musings on Glendale Graveyard

Tired of staying at home this afternoon, I decided to take my bicycle out for a little spin through Glendale. It was freezing outside, but at first I didn't feel it - I just winded my way down Myrtle Avenue, the setting sun casting an orange hue on the shuttered businesses lining the streets. Scattered black-clad pedestrians filtered past as I slowly pedaled my way to my destination - the Cypress Hills cemetery.
Past an old catholic church and through a rickety iron gate, I saw before me an expanse of graves, covering the ground like fresh snow. Only the wind, graves, and the trees kept me company as journeyed past the rows of tombs. Looking to my right and left I could see entire streets of the dead, segregated into ethnic neighborhoods in death as they very well might have been in life - Chinese, Italian, Jewish, Irish. You don't need to be a sensitive soul to get a bit chokey as you see name after name, date of birth and date of death, each one having contained such vitality at one point, each one now inert (and in many cases, it seems, forgotten).
Finally, I wound my way up a hill to a copse of trees and laid my read bike against an elm. Before me, past the graves, past the trees, past the rickety fence, lay the skyline of Manhattan aglow with the fire of a setting sun. And here, strewn about me, were all those who had come here - to find freedom, to make a name for themselves, to discover themselves. And yet, these graves were not those of conquering heroes, but the nameless thousands who had lived and died in obscurity, and some in poverty. This contrast, between the vibrant, vertical spires of achievment and the horizontal expanses of the inert humble, is what struck me so.
For a long time cities killed more of their population than their citizens could replace: disease, malnutrition, crime, and all the others were to blame. To make up for this net loss, cities had to draw people in from the countryside, the pure, innocent townsfolk lured into the metropolitan furnace to, through their sacrifice, power the engine of modernity and progress. Today cities are rather more stable than in this period - birth rates have equaled or exceeded death rates. And yet, there is still something enormously powerful, and still relevant, in the idea that the city at once elevates and destroys, pulls up and pushes down, brings life and brings death to its citizenry. And yet, people still keep coming to the city - for only here can their dreams for a better life possibly come true. The graves surrounding me attest to how few of those dreams were ever, in the end, fully realized.
It is almost a psychological need for graveyards such as this to be relegated to the outskirts of the city. Just like the outcasts of the past, the homeless, the insane, the criminal, were banished from the center of the city into remote facilities to spare the "civilized" townsfolk knowledge of their existence, so the abodes of the nameless, humble dead must be kept out of sight, out of mind. In a metropolis so concerned with getting ahead, with the quick buck, with the hustle, the mere presence of these graves would, possibly, temper their spirits and bring them the kind of deep, profound thoughts which do not necessarily facilitate global capitalism. Ironically, the sight of the dead would make people too human.
And so the young, brilliant young things work at the office, celebrate their accomplishments, pursue their little goals and ambitions. And later, their bodies will be lowered into the ground in places like Cypress Hills Cemetery, next to people much like them from generations past. Their spirit, of course, will live on in the hearts of those that remember them. But to the distant metropolis, as vibrant as fire and yet cold as ice, it is as if they never existed.