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Metropolis And Mental Life Analysis

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Metropolis And Mental Life Analysis
A Rural Feel, Without Ever Leaving the City
The metropolis is a place where nervous stimulation is found everywhere and getting away from it usually involves a trip outside of the metropolis. Satie’s “Gnossiennes No. 1” and Stravinsky’s “Rite” synthesize rural living by connecting with the listener through the unconscious mind. By making use of the ideas that Simmel conveys in his lecture The Metropolis and Mental Life, I will reveal how Satie’s Gnossiennes No. 1 and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring transport the audience from metropolitan life to rural living.
Simmel explains the difference between the metropolitan life and the rural life in his lecture “The Metropolis and Mental Life”:
The psychological basis of the metropolitan type of individuality
…show more content…
The constant change found in the city takes a lot of energy to decipher and it negatively affects the individual mind. the schedule is a lot like the thought the individual uses to understand everythiThese are the psychological conditions which the metropolis creates. With each crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life, the city sets up a deep contrast with small town and rural life with reference to the sensory foundations of psychic life. The metropolis exacts from man as a discriminating creature a different amount of consciousness than does rural life. Here the rhythm of life and sensory mental imagery flows more slowly, more habitually, and more evenly …show more content…
Without schedules everyone living in the city would be in complete and utter chaos. Simmel goes on to talk about how important schedules are to a metropolis by using Berlin as an example, “If all clocks and watches in Berlin would suddenly go wrong in different ways, even if only by one hour, all economic life and communication of the city would be disrupted for a long time” (50). This phenomenon would cause the busy, yet structured lives of everyone living in the metropolis to lose all structure and “break down into an inextricable chaos”. The schedule of metropolitan life is paramount to the success of the organized schedule. With constant changes in stimulation and the need for a schedule the metropolitan man uses his head more than his heart (Simmel 48). Rural life allows you think use your heart more than your head because you are using less consciousness and are able to feel more. Rural living allows for emotions and feelings that scheduled metropolitan living do not

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