I thought, as I have many times in the concourse, that if I were a stranger to this overwhelming city, it would be helpful to me to know that something in me and in everyone around me already knew how to fit in with all the people circulating through the city and going about their business. After emerging onto Vanderbilt Avenue, I found that when I crossed over and walked along the south side of Forty-third Street, I could for a while keep with me this awareness of the cooperation that makes a city possible. It lasted about a block and a half—until, as I was standing at a stoplight at Fifth Avenue, a screaming ambulance and the rest of the traffic brought me back to a more ordinary sense of separateness and disjointedness. At the same time, waiting for the light to change, I could see that even though I no longer felt it, some form of cooperation was continuing to govern the movements of people near me on the sidewalk. People moving in four different directions passed one another without colliding, and in each minute, hundres of accidents never occurred. Still, the overall level of cooperation seemed diminished, because there was no sense of connectedness between the people on foot and the people in vehicles.
Tony Hiss, The Experience of Place, on emerging from the main concourse of Grand Central Terminal.
The idea that the unspoken contracts between city-goers — as simple as avoiding running into each other — enhances a personal connection to an otherwise anonymous, lonely urban setting, and even provokes a kind of shared experience (though one difficult to articulate) is fascinating, and has much truth to it, I think.
But I wonder — this same gravitation in a city toward connectedness, an instant and easy plugging-in, seems also to lead to a deeper sense of disconnection; or a disconcerting sense that none of these experiences is meaningful: that they are exactly as personal and close and knowable as is the stranger passing by in a half-second; that the cooperation I felt with this or that person among many is a very strange kind of cooperation where we cooperate to avoid each other; to avoid awkward eye contact, physical contact, or disrupting personal space.
