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What’s to blame is the comfort that a higher class status affords—the independence, the insularity, the security, the illusion of not needing other people.
“it looked more ladylike to do something uselessly pretty than to do nothing.”
The more comfortable we are, research suggests, the more destruction we are likely to be causing.
Like the people who occupy neighborhoods that are overpoliced and underprotected, bicycles know that what keeps them safe on the street is not the law, but their own vigilance, quickness, and wit.
On a bicycle, I’m alert, aware of everything. It’s exhilarating, the narrow margin, the exposure to injury, the steadying force of the spinning wheels.
Precarity is not the price of riding a bicycle, I think, so much as what it has to offer. Wind, a rush of blood, fissures and pits in the asphalt, an errant animal, eyes in a mirror, glint of sunlight on chrome, scent of lake water, catcalls, a soaring feeling. But that is not to say that liberation doesn’t have a price.
More than a million people will die of consumption this year. Just not here.
