IN MY LATE THIRTIES I came across the epic poem Paterson, by William Carlos Williams. In an introductory note, Williams describes its premise: that “a man in himself is a city, beginning, seeking, achieving and concluding his life in ways which the various aspects of a city may embody—if imaginatively conceived—any city, all the details of which may be made to voice his most intimate convictions.”

It’s not that I’ve ever knowingly felt like a city. But if it’s true that each of us is like a city, then it might also be true that each city is like a person. And so I like to think of Pittsfield—its streetlamps strung like nerves, its thoughts idling in the layer of reflective air on the roads on August afternoons, or its memories falling slowly through the gray-to-black depths beneath the ice on its lakes in January—and of who it might be.

And if a city is like a person, then I can understand better why we might speak of them as mothers: as Mecca and Asunción are each known as the Mother of Cities, and Cape Town is the Mother City; and as Kipling remembered his first city (“Mother of Cities to me, / For I was born in her gate”), in his poem “To the City of Bombay,” in which he also described an individual’s attachment to their hometown as like that of “a child to the mother’s gown.”

It explains, indeed, why we might speak of a city’s aspects in such human terms: its spirit and its soul (an idea at least as old as Plato); its heart, arteries, lungs, and bones; its sisters; and even its spouse, as Jeddah is known as the Bride of the Red Sea, and as Venice has loved—and been loved by—her waters, into which each year the doge, or the mayor, now, still ritually casts a wedding band. It explains how it is that we can love one city so deeply that when we close our eyes we may picture its upturned face, or try to imagine what the sky was like on its first day.