Twilight in Utrecht. I stand in the street, waiting. People walk along.
Their faces, privately illuminated by their own mobile screens, as eager actors in the first row of their own theater plays. Or as the unique audience to their own monologue. Some smile, some are serious. All of them walk, perhaps slower than they could. One or two talk to the screen, softly nested in their hands, as if praying to a distant and yet loved, god. I known that all of them go from somewhere to somewhere else, even though I barely see their moving bodies, let alone their steps. They move, a silent procession, a slow dance of illuminated faces, bodies floating in the arteries of the city, being pumped and moved and flushed around by their small devices.
I have though about this scene for few years now. I recorded it in a note, to which I come back now and then, and try to say something meaningful about. I actually know what I want to say. And yet, every time, I write nothing. I hold myself still, a witness and perhaps even a part of the procession, of the flow. Perhaps to write about it would break... what precisely? the magic of the continuity? the ongoing performance of viewers and talkers and actors and audiences? I have very few answers, and meanwhile I ponder them, I write nothing. People right now is still walking along, I’m sure of it. The city lives, even when sleeping through this COVID nightmare. The pulse of Utrecht is softer, smaller, slower. But there is a pulse. There is a beat that still connect us.
That is, after all else has been said, what I actually wanted to say. Uncountable numbers of electrons have been dedicated to describe how our phones and our tablets and our laptops and our smart-whatever isolate us, makes us lonely and asocial. And I don’t think so. I see these people walking alone and I see nobody alone, I see them hearing and talking to others, I see the veins of the city opening to other cities, other places. A film made in hollywood plays in one of the little screens, a mother in a country far away smiles to her daughter studying in Utrecht, a lover demands to know when his loved one will come home, or will arrive to the lobby of the hotel. Even those that hear music on their own are partaking in the art that others created, and changed, and tuned and performed.
We are not alone, I want to shout. We are not alone!
But if I would, I would take them out of their connections, of their concerts and films and families and friends and occasional or lifelong lovers. So I say nothing, and I look around, at the flow of my city.