“With a cigar in my mouth and a newspaper in my lap, I had been amusing myself for the greater part of the afternoon, now in poring over advertisements, now in observing the promiscuous company in the room, and now in peering through the smoky panes into the street. This latter is one of the principal thoroughfares of the city, and had been verý much crowded during the whole day.”
Poe’s man of the crowd would never be found in suburban Atlanta. Not in Lawrenceville, not in Suwanee, not in Duluth.
I know this. I know in particular Gwinnett county, where one of my brothers lives.
And I think it makes a difference.
Last night, like the convalescent narrator of Poe’s story, I was in the fluxes and refluxes of a major city. That is, I was walking from the Republique metro stop down Rue de Temple. It was around 5 in the afternoon, when the winter evening is coming in. The advent of evening so early, so Decemberishly, causes seasonal disorder in some people I know – a sense of melancholy and futility. I am more resistant to the preliminaries of night coming so soon in what I consider to be, still, technically, the day. Autumn melancholy is something I enjoy, the way I enjoy tragedy – I have a gaudy sense of it. Here I am, another deathbound being, alas alack. When I was a kid, I used to enjoy throwing myself around, pretending I was shot, pretending I was dying, like a gangster at the end of a movie: “Is this the end of Rico?” Which is the Jimmy Cagney line – I think it is Jimmy Cagney.
So there I was in the hustle, planning on getting a few things from Monoprix, passing the beggar in front of the Monoprix door, refusing to give him anything and then feeling guilty about not giving anything and giving him a Euro and then finding my items in that giant gut. Along with so many others.
When I am in the crowd, I often think of how, during the day, in the Marais where I live, I must see at least a thousand people that I don’t know. My thoughts often move from the extent of this hustle to the facts as I know them of the billions, literally billions, of people in the world. The people I pass all have clothes, have shoes, have evidently eaten in the past day, smoke cigs or carry umbrellas, shine with finery or, like the beggar, have not washed their clothes in days. And I get a feeling, multiplying the numbers, that this can’t last. How can it last? It is so enormous, eight billion mouths, forever needing eight billion meals at least. The cars, the lights, the bikes, the “made”-ness, the waste, it hits you in the face. I am part of it, a meal-eater, a clothed man, with a backpack no less and a card to ride the metro.
One absorbs this, as a city dweller, without thinking too much. On an average day on Rue des Quatre-Fils, I see a pod of elementary school students being marched somewhere on the sidewalks, I see tottering old people, older even than me, waiting for the bus, I see policemen and the gendarmes, armed with machine guns, I see selfie taking tourists and, so often it is surprising, people setting up cameras to photograph models, I see people sitting in the chairs outside our neighborhood café, La Perle, or across the street in a space La Perle has more or less claimed, I see twenty-somethings from the U.S. talking excitedly to each other or French service workers booking it to work, and it builds inside of me.
When I was a child growing up on Nielsen court, in contrast, it was rare, very rare, that I saw someone on the street that I didn’t know. That person, I could guess, was either related to the families living in the ten houses whose yards abutted the street, or were friends. The dogs on the street had, of course, this same knowledge. The numerous cohort for me was the school, where, indeed, there were hundreds. My high school might have had as many as seven hundred pupils. But the world was, evidently, much less populated around me. This changed my perception of my own importance, for one thing – it is much easier to feel important in a small group than in a vast throng. And for another thing, the world looked imminently carry-able. Surely we can all eat, work, shit, make love, and sleep within the materials at hand.
When I go to visit my brother in Lawrenceville, this sense of a portable world comes back. His street would erupt with astonishment if someone set up a camera on it and filmed a model posing sexily or in impossible togs or whatever. Nobody is making selfies, here. The work done by Amazon delivery or UPS does introduce the stranger, but the stranger is suitably uniformed. The world comes in through cable, through the internet, but it doesn’t press fleshily against one.
“It was now fully night-fall, and a thick humid fog hung over the city, soon ending in a settled and heavy rain. This change of weather had an odd effect upon the crowd, the whole of which was at once put into new commotion, and overshadowed by a world of umbrellas. The waver, the jostle, and the hum increased in a tenfold degree.”
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