`Ugliness Creates Individuality'

“Cities that are too beautiful lose their individuality. Some of the southern towns cleaned up for tourists remind one more of glossy photo ads than of organic human settlements. Ugliness creates individuality. Cracow cannot complain of a dearth of infelicitous, heavy, melancholy places.”

[from Adam Zagajewski’s “Cracow,” Two Cities: Exile, History, and the Imagination, 1995, translated by Lillian Vallee]