 |
|
|
 |
 |
|
|
| |
1
Someone passes me on the street. 4:17 pm. Cloudy April day. I glance at this person, at their face, and feel an inexplicable tenderness.
I also feel a little forlorn. I’m not likely to ever see this person again. They’ll never know that they made their way into my thoughts. Instead, the picture keeps changing; other people enter my field of vision, and what had burned itself so distinctly on my retina, for one brief moment, is replaced—gradually, methodically.
“Love at last sight,” Walter Benjamin called it.
It crosses my mind that this recipe for love depends on the inevitability of loss. It helps, too, that what passes between finding and losing someone is a mere instant. It’s like a dream that recedes as soon as it’s recalled. I walk on, resisting the urge to turn around; and before memory gets wiped clean, I can’t help but tell myself a tale—imagining what it might feel like to be someone other than myself.
Isn’t that one reason why people live in cities—to be close to people they don’t know, to garner anonymity without suffering too much loneliness? But then I’ve never really known how to gauge what distance to take with people. That’s why I take photographs. Sometimes it’s enough simply to hold one in my hands—a flat, rectangular token of this strange intimacy.
2
I’ve always thought of myself as the most important person in the world. I don’t know if there’s any way around it. Isn’t it a fact of human consciousness—this bit of hubris, this feeling that the world revolves around me?
But it’s very, very difficult to fathom that everyone feels this way. It makes me dizzy to walk down the street, pass hundreds of people, and realize that each one is positioned, in their own mind, at the center of the universe. I know, I know—how could it be otherwise? And yet it’s overwhelming: the sheer volume of conceit, the virtual humming of so many people bearing the burden of keeping watch over themselves.
Or is someone else doing the watching? A mother, embedded in the mind? An invisible, omniscient auteur? Each person is starring in their own movie, as it were. Diligent and unwavering, the camera’s eye has the steadfastness of a shadow.
I find myself wanting to bear witness to this strange phenomenon: each person, so small and insignificant, writ large on the self’s private screen. For everyone, the world is nothing other than a dreamlike projection of personality, an idiosyncratic mise-en-scène. This hidden nobility, anonymity’s flipside—it’s a secret we keep, even from ourselves.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
