I experience recurrent melancholy revelations, simultaneously cathartic and disempowering; the kind of reflective ennui which occurs for me in consideration of a late afternoon’s setting sun as viewed through a window while on metropolitan transport or reflected in a shopfront window, perhaps viewed through the bustle of human traffic along some darkening streetscape corridor. This is an unenviable fatigue borne of repetitive immersion in the city’s tinker-toy metronome, the Keystone Cops comedy and unrelenting organisational or administrative confusion of everyday living. The mad parade of daily, weekly, yearly working life catches up with me in these moments, an exhaustion and fatigue characterised, illustrated and epistemologically inflated by a lived experience and frustration borne of those cycles and periodic oscillations by which we human beings mark time and generate limited (and very likely, exquisitely fragile) containers, vessels and conceptual archives or memories into which all of our very small, very brief and very precious lives, experiences and meanings are compressed.
I have for a time experienced the feeling evoked in your piece, and I totally agree, and I am moved by it, actually, especially on my home to my family while riding a train, or a bus, or a jeepney… But if you live in a country not equally endowed with the blessing of affluence, or opportunity, the scene that you described is heaven on earth, for your eyes have been shielded from the marching of destitute souls lining up on streets begging, stealing and dying in the arms of their asphalt bed where flowers don’t grow.
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The concrete streets of my own city also embrace the poor but I acknowledge with deepest humility the relativities of degree and of deprivation. My eyes, unlike many others, are open to the harder facts of our wider world.
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“My eyes, unlike many others, are open to the harder facts of our wider world.” — Indeed, I believe this from what I read from your post. You are a keen observer… and you remind me of my college professor who is a philosopher
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