Someone In This Picture

Ten cities, ten ordinary crowds, and in each one a person holding something down.

Ten wide shots of dull places. A flower market before eight. A platform at rush hour. A food wagon at one in the morning. A crossing in the rain.

Everybody in them is doing something ordinary, and in every single one of them there is one person who is not what the picture says they are.

The rule, once, and then I stop explaining

A glamour covers one thing. Not your face and not your name. One tell. The ear, the sclera, the tusk, the tail.

One tell is one glamour. Two tells is two glamours, held separately, at the same time, and the cost does not divide. So somebody with six things to cover is holding six of them at once, all day, through a full shift, and nobody holding six is having a nice afternoon.

Which means the interesting part of a picture like this is never the monster. It is the one thing that slipped.

01. Wrocław, flowers before eight

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 1855

Flower markets open at six and the people who run them have hands like tools. I used to find that picturesque. It is a job, and the picturesque part was entirely on my side of the transaction.

The man tying this bouquet is doing delicate work with hands built for nothing delicate. Most real competence looks like that close up. Slightly wrong for the task, and faster than you.

02. Berlin, twenty past six on a platform

Unreal City, / Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, 1922

Eliot wrote that about a bridge at dawn and it has been true of every rush hour since. Nobody standing on a platform is anywhere. We agree to be freight for forty minutes a day and we call it a commute.

What I actually notice in crowded places is how precisely people manage distance. There is a silent arithmetic to it, it almost never fails, and not one person in that station could tell you the rules they are following.

03. Valencia, the market hall at midday

When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is not amusing herself with me more than I with her. Michel de Montaigne, Essays, Book II, 1580

Montaigne wrote most of his best work about not knowing things. That line is four hundred and fifty years old and it is still the only honest position anybody has taken on cats.

Animals get a vote in a market. They decide where to sit and the humans plan around it. I have a weakness for places where the rules are set by whoever cares least.

04. Berlin, a lobby at twenty to nine

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859

Dickens got there first and got it exactly. The secret is not the exception. It is standard equipment, fitted to everybody, no upgrade available.

You share a lift with a person for four years and you learn their floor. That is the entire file. It is not a tragedy, it is the arrangement, and it is most of the reason a city of half a million people functions at all.

05. Chicago, lunch off a wagon

In the struggle between yourself and the world, second the world. Franz Kafka, the Zürau aphorisms, 1917 to 1918, translated; the German is "Im Kampf zwischen dir und der Welt sekundiere der Welt."

Kafka has a reputation for gloom that the aphorisms do not really support. That one is a joke about scale, and it lands because he happens to be right.

There is a specific pleasure in eating standing up, in the cold, at midday, with somewhere to be in nine minutes. No restaurant has ever improved on it and several have tried to sell it back to me at four times the price.

06. Wrocław, the market lanes after dark

She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 1925

Woolf put that thought in the head of a woman planning a party, which is the only place anybody ever thinks it. A crowd is where you find out how alone you are, and a Christmas market is a crowd with a soundtrack and a deadline.

Also, and I want to be clear about this: mulled wine is bad. We do it every year anyway, holding the cup with both hands. The holding is the point. The drink is a pretext for the holding.

Shawy: the tall one in the coat at the back of that lane is me and I would like it on the record that I was not buying anything, I was walking through, I was passing, I had places to be

You were there for two hours.

07. Istanbul, the spice arcade

He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd. It will be in vain to follow; for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds. Edgar Allan Poe, The Man of the Crowd, 1840

Poe's narrator follows a stranger through London for a full day and night, learns absolutely nothing, and then announces the man is a genius of deep crime. That is what anybody does when they have wasted a day and refuse to say so.

A bazaar is built for exactly that mistake. A hundred metres of arcade, every stall a reason to stop, and the only person you remember afterwards is the one who never moved.

08. Tokyo, a crossing in the rain

Multitude, solitude: identical terms, and interchangeable by the active and fertile poet. Charles Baudelaire, Le Spleen de Paris, "Les Foules", 1869, translated; the French is "Multitude, solitude : termes égaux et convertibles pour le poëte actif et fécond."

Baudelaire is the patron saint of standing in a crowd on purpose. He thought a crowd was somewhere you could be more yourself rather than less, which is either profound or the reasoning of a man avoiding his desk. Probably both. Usually both.

A big crossing in the rain is the best free show any city offers. Two thousand people solve a geometry problem in eleven seconds, twice a minute, in the dark, and not one of them looks up from their phone to admire it.

09. Kraków, one in the morning

So this is where people come to live; I would have thought it is a city to die in. Rainer Maria Rilke, the opening of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, 1910, translated

Rilke got to Paris at 27 and opened his only novel with that. It is unfair to Paris and completely fair to every city at one in the morning.

Late food is the most honest meal there is. Nobody at that counter is pretending the evening went to plan, everybody is warm, and those two facts hold each other up until the tram comes.

10. A market town, twenty past twelve

Because I could not stop for Death, / He kindly stopped for me. Emily Dickinson, poem 479, written about 1863

Noon is the hour when nothing happens, which is precisely why every farming culture that has ever existed put something in it.

The Slavic version walks the standing grain at the hottest hour with a sickle and asks you three questions. There is no correct answer. I think about that more than is reasonable for a piece of weather folklore, mostly because I have since met the version of it that works in an office and books meetings for half twelve.

If you want the answers

There is exactly one in every picture. I am not going to label them, because the entire mechanic rests on nobody looking, and an arrow pointing at the answer would be me doing the not-looking for you.

Ask in the comments and I will tell you which figure and what slipped. And if you find one I did not put there, say so, because that means the crowd is doing my job for me and I would like to know how much of it.

Azi