rushhour

Rush hour

by Bob on February 8, 2007

Rush hour. Evening. Weekday. Downtown Boston. Train to the South Shore. Sigh. Can of sardines, although a bit more polite than NYC ... although seemingly devoid of emotional creative volatility and lasting human interaction, save for the proverbial elevator romance and seven-second-fall-in-love glancings. Reminscent of the brilliant 1982 film "Koyaanisqatsi" which I saw on a lark not knowing anything about it ... in the middle of an afternoon in NYC ... and was forever transfixed.

Cf. http://www.koyaanisqatsi.org/ ... (let's not get to the "We are all made of Stars" song by Moby ... an oblique homage to Clark's "2001: A Space Odyssey")

I do not like rush hour. I never did when I lived in New York City. In fact, I never travelled in the rush hour times. Always off-hours in NYC. It made life bearable.

Rush hour behaviour and people are so Pavlovian. The phenomenon reminds me of Charlie Chaplin and his "Modern Times" where he is holding the hands of a huge clock and as a number lights up he has to move one of the hands on it or else something bad happens in the metaphorical human factory,

I gave up on rush hour many decades ago in NYC. I just slowed down one day and decided to walk to my office from home and back no matter what. It was great. People to talk to, squirrels bouncing about, trees and flowers breathing. Relaxation.

Then the Sony Walkman got invented (for all the wrong reasons -- it was supposed to be an answer to people carrying big radios and boom boxes in NYC but some Sony engineer didn't realise it wasn't about the sound but about the ego).

All of a sudden people stopped talking to each other on the way in walking to the lab. They were shutting out the world with their new found social insulator, the Walkman.

So, it would seem to most people that the Walkman, the iPOD, etc, make life bearable by shutting out the very essence of life, most of the time, other people.

"'We have found happiness', say the last men, and they blinked." ... Nietzsche knew in Thus Spake Zarathustra. Okay, the whole quote:

* * *

Lo! I show you THE LAST MAN.

"What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?"--so

asketh the last man and blinketh.

The earth hath then become small, and on it there hoppeth the last man who

maketh everything small. His species is ineradicable like that of the

ground-flea; the last man liveth longest.

"We have discovered happiness"--say the last men, and blink thereby.

They have left the regions where it is hard to live; for they need warmth.

One still loveth one's neighbour and rubbeth against him; for one needeth

warmth.

* * *

Luckily, I think, the rise and fall of civilisations is still on a sinusoidal path. I hope so.