Special Tragedy

    Why us?
    Never conceding defeat, the prophets never asked. Nor did the old guiding spirits, whose good intentions had doomed the city; they'd moved their homes and operations to the county long ago. The question, if it arose at all, arose in silence, in the silence of the city's empty streets and, more insistently, in the silence of the century separating a young St Louis from a dead one. What becomes of a city no living person can remember, of an age whose passing no one survives to regret? Only St Louis knew. Its fate was sealed within it, its special tragedy special nowhere else.

Jonathan Franzen, The Twenty-Seventh City, 1988