Yesterday, while waiting for the elevator, I looked out the window down onto the street below. I was up so high that people looked small, like toys, with their briefcases and sneakers and coats flapping in the autumn wind.I wonder, how many times does someone see me from a distance?
I don't really mean watching me as an individual, as someone that has been attached to a specific identity. I don’t mean attraction or curiosity or being noticed, but rather the opposite of relevance.
How many times am I, say, on a Ferry on the San Francisco Bay while someone is looking at the boat from a car driving across the Golden Gate Bridge?
How many times does someone lying on the beach see the plane I'm in slowly move across the arch of blue sky in his span of vision?
How many times has someone taken a photograph and caught a fragment of me as I move across the frame? How many albums do I live in as even less than a stranger, the tip of my shoe intruding on a picture, a brown blur caused by a curly strand of my hair ruining an otherwise perfect family shot?
How many times does someone look down and notice people look like toys, with their briefcases and sneakers and coats flapping in the autumn wind; and realize they not only seem small, but trivial, deceived in their sweet sense of self importance, foolish, really, to be hurrying along as if their efforts really amounted to anything?
What I mean is, how many times is one of those minuscule, ant sized people way down below me?
7 comments:
Dear Dushka,
How many times? Countless!
I've always been intrigued by the same notion. I sometimes get terribly anxious over the notion that I am terribly small in this world.
It's all rather humbling.
But then, I think that I am a part of this world. I am here, I play my part. And so do you.
I see you, Dushka. From a distance. And I revel on your light.
Much love, as ever, for both of you.
M
How curious! Perhaps there is an aura of existentialism in the air today. What else could explain your blog and my new poll!?
I love your poll. My answer is in there.
When I was a little child I lived in a small county in a farm, for that time I used to stand still in front of the window and stare to the people walking outside for hours, I eventually enjoyed watching when a stormy rain suddenly caught people so they either had to run or find a temporary roof to be warmed up so when the rain calmed down they could go ahead.
Now, that I am an adult and I live in a huge, impersonal city I eventually wonder which is the meaning for being a dusty particle spinning around, well, I've realized that no matter if I am an important for the entire world but what do really matters is that may be one day I can be the entire world for one only person.
Tessitore,
Indeed. All you need is love. I was listening to that Beatles song yesterday: "Nothing you can do that can't be done - all you need is love." Brilliant.
Just saw somewhere today that an average Londoner gets caught on CCTV 300 times a day on average. A lot of video footage of me out there already!
Arseny, you're anonymously famous.
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