slots

I spent the last couple of days in Brussels. I have always liked travelling, especially those parts where you drink in the strangeness of a city – not especially the fragile chain of arrangements required to get you there. I have wandered the streets of Rome at night, Munich in the snow, Chicago, Berlin… and what I like best is the vertigo, the visceral fairground-like feeling of so much strangeness.

But I am not sure that I have really fully understood the appeal until now: it is not the city that is strange but me. Walking aimlessly around whatever part of a city you find yourself in is something which happens in dead time – time which is not part of the ‘itinerary’, which is perhaps after the conference and before the dinner. Time which is not part of the plan. And for this time there is no routine, no familiarity – not like home where all time has its routines, its well-worn shape. Loose in a strange place in smooth space: time with no particular purpose, where you have no role to play or script to guide you, like the actor who leaves the stage and comes face-to-face with their own dizzying unfamiliarity and shapelessness. At such times you see that you are almost nobody, undefined and undifferentiated.

I had been reading William Boyd’s ‘Ordinary Thunderstorms’ on the plane: the story of a man who finds his life suddenly disrupted, and falls from the coherent career of a climatologist into a shapeless, homeless struggle for existence, all within the space of a few hours. Around me in the twilight of an elegant European street it is clear that people are busy about their business – it is only me that has no direction. And so it is – as I say – smooth: no slot into which you fit, no rut for your wheels, a world of ice and the vulnerable uncoordinated creature that you have suddenly become.

I realise that the experience is a little sadder and a little less exhilarating now that I am older – Heidegger used the expression ‘fallen’ to refer to the human condition, fallen into a concern with the things around us – constantly and deliberately distracted. As I ride the train to work I am surrounded by the fallen – fallen into their books, blackberries, iphones, laptops and schedules. And I am one of them. But my grip on reality is, I think, less secure. I doubt that many would be troubled by an unfamiliar street – or venture out of the Hotel in search of it. What is a little sad about us is that we shall remain unacquainted with ourselves in all likelihood, and that we have lost the childlike in our everyday lives.