Horizontal Vertigo

This month, as a belated tenth anniversary trip, Katie and I spent a wonderful week in Mexico City. We rented an apartment in the Roma Norte neighborhood (yes, we made our pilgrimage). It proved to be an ideal hub for exploring the city. We walked almost everywhere and loved almost everything we saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched (OK, yeah, there were occasional exceptions). We could barely scratch the surface, so I was glad to be reading Juan Villoro’s Horizontal Vertigo (Pantheon) as well, a love letter to CDMX, with all its many layers and contradictions.

“Nevertheless, the vastness of the territory made me realize that I could find my own space there. I decided to belong to the city, as if I didn’t before. I decided to love it and despise it in the way you love and despise something that belongs to you. I decided to understand it with a mixture of enthusiasm and astonishment. For someone who’s disoriented, the labyrinth is a house.”