The Weight of Glass

I remember sitting in a small noodle shop in Kowloon, watching the rain streak against the window. An old man sat across from me, methodically folding a napkin into a tiny, perfect crane. He didn’t look up at the towering steel giants outside, even as the fog rolled in to swallow their peaks. I asked him if the height of the city ever made him feel small. He just smiled and pointed to the water, where the lights were beginning to dance in the dark. He told me that we spend our lives building things to touch the clouds, but we only ever really find our footing in the reflections below. It was a simple reminder that for all our ambition and the sheer, crushing scale of what we construct, we are still just creatures of the earth, tethered to the tide. We build to reach up, but we live by looking down.

Ryszard Wierzbicki has captured this exact tension in his image titled Hong Kong Bay. It manages to hold the gravity of the skyline and the fluidity of the water in one breath. Does the scale of a city make you feel more ambitious, or more like a ghost?