An old man on the subway this morning, read a paperback about the golden proportions… next to him, a rather affluent looking woman with a hardcover book about the ultimate friendship…
Next to her, a woman in her 50’s, reading about Filippo Brunelleschi.
All three showed very subtle reactions to their texts… The old man had a certain amount of cynicism in him, though he seemed very interested in whatever he was looking for in the index (which happened to be in the back of the book.)
The woman reading about the ultimate friendship looked at the pages as if the book were are a little puppy, performing cute little tricks. She was really enjoying whatever she was reading, but it was more in a way as if her son had written it. It appeared as if there were little messages written to her by her beloved son. She seemed to experience little ripples of joy… The black and white portrait of a very lonely looking man on the back cover of the book looked nothing like her, but it was a nice idea to let her have a little more connection to the text.
The Brunelleschi lady appeared to be a reading machine. She did not really move her body at all, the pages in the book just slowly passed by her, as if they were the quarter mile markers on a straight highway, somewhere far in the west… Brunelleschi was staring from a cutout in the paperback cover, towards the lonely looking man who knew all about the ultime friendship…
A mother rolled a stroller with her son into the subway car. I moved to the side, so she could sit next to me and comfortably attend to her probably 2 year old… The child was completely still, but the mother replied to a somehow unspoken request and gave him his ridiculously colorful, covered watercup. He just held on to it, as if his hands were sensing the various frequencies of color.
The boy had large, completely blue eyes… he looked at the world around him as if he were a very old creator, a traveler through bodies, somehow amazed as to what has been done to all of his inventions since his last incarnation. In his slow and thorough scan through the subway car, he found me… he found my eyes… he stared into them with such insanely unbearable intensity that I had to almost immediately look away, to avoid what seemed a complete download of all my ever recorded memories. This boy was not an average child. This boy was clearly a very old soul, just re-gaining speed, re-awakening, he was on his way right past the people on this train, he was on his way past that old man on the seat behind him, trying to find mistakes in the divine proportions, he was going to pass right through that ultimate kind of friendship, the way this boy looked, he was going straight for Filippo Brunelleschi and who knows, beyond?…
The boy tried to get into my brain a few more times. I never managed to stand his stare for more than just a few harsh seconds…
When he was not looking, I noticed that his right hand was already picking on the cuticles of his left fingers… his brain probably hungry for just any kind of stimulation…
My stop saved me… I managed to avoid the stare when leaving the subway car… I wished the mother a great day… she thanked me in a way that made me believe that she knew quite exactly what was happening here…
I wonder what the boy will really end up doing… he certainly planted himself in a very stimulating place… …