Cristina's Library

It is a cold, frigid night in Toronto. How lonely the wind makes me feel, enveloping my body in isolation. There is a lot happening outside — snow squalls drift aimlessly and bitterly cold gusts blow garbage, trees, branches, into the street. The bumps and claps and booms make noise, noise that only emphasizes the loud emptiness of this place. I wondered, while walking up the frozen concrete stairs to my front door, how the city would look if all of our creation did not exist. It would be a barren land of ice-laden trees, shoe-print-free snow dunes, darkness after sunset. There would be no tire tracks, no street lights, no debris, no complaining about the weather. It would simply be, in its purest state, and then Spring would come and it would carry on beautifully with no one to see it, living and ageing gracefully anyway, dying, then born again. Are we simply in the way of the earth’s natural processes, or have we created them, new and scary and manipulated, like Dr. Frankenstein and his monster, having rebelled against nature only to die at the hands of his own creation, a modern-day Prometheus.