Losing faith in your own singularity is the start of wisdom, I suppose; also the first announcement of death.
All that a city will ever allow you is an angle on it, an oblique, indirect sample of what it contains, or what passes through it; a point of view.
The historian's job is to aggrandize, promoting accident to inevitability and innocuous circumstance to portent.
Facts have long since upstaged fiction, and the novelistic imagination now contents itself with documenting incidents it wouldn't have the temerity to invent.
All that a city will ever allow you is an angle on it - an oblique, indirect sample of what it contains, or what passes through it; a point of view.