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At 630 a.m. in New York, I see many of the same people at the same stop, day after day; people I never talk to or even make direct eye-contact with. There is an amazing degree of distance built into the small spaces between people on a subway car; metaphysical miles stand between human bodies which are, physically, centimeters apart. More and more — as I have noted many times in this diary — these people, these fellow commuters, these quasi-intimate strangers, are looking at (disappearing into) their phones. Often, I am, have been, critical of this behavior; recently, however, I have felt a different kind of intuitive response: a kind of tender pity; amourning for these human beings, these human bodies, which, being mortal, will inevitably die one day, (perhaps) never having broken with their routine, without having ever had a conversation with another person on their commute. The sometimes painful, sometimes ideal, anonymity of city-life is a philosophical experiment — which, like all philosophical experiments, generates only questions, and never answers.
