Eyes after set of eyes pass by as I walk these city blocks. Eyes of all shapes, colors and sizes. Some hide behind darkened glasses, framed by metal or plastic of various colors. Others are uncovered while gazing straight ahead, as if ashamed by such naked exposure in a world on the other side of Eden. Together we glance and dart from steel buildings to concrete floors to fleshy bodies and back to our feet below. Alone we each dance uncomfortable around our own kind, looking anywhere but directly back at those whose attention we have captured, those stranger’s eyes.
It is July in Lima, and I sit under a canopy of the Panza de Burro, or the grey underbelly of a donkey. Such is the Peruvian phrase for the placidly charcoal, winter sky that hovers over the city from May to November. The conditions leave my glances into the foggy Pacific horizon filled with longing for a world washed anew in the light of a resurrected sun. It is not surprising, to me at least, why author Herman Melville once called Lima, “the saddest city on earth,” a sentiment undoubtedly uttered on a visit during the winter months.
Lima is no different from any other massive city, standing as it is at just under eight million people. At the very least, its similarity lies in that all cities look the same when abstracted away from their idiosyncrasies. Its streets contain residents and tourists mixed uncomfortably together as they walk unintentionally attached on sidewalks and eat in cafes. Its inhabitants, both rich and poorer, live in houses of four walls with roofs thatched together to shield the elements. Such homes nuzzle into neighborhoods built into the rocky coast, or set along flattened, moderately gridded streets. Mixed within these residents are the shops of grocers and cafes peddling the same dishes, albeit prepared by different hands. It is a city, like all others, which grows overwhelming when one takes time to consider its details: details of the 16 million feet who live here and the reasons they walk to places deemed important, details like the 16 million hands who call this place home, the bodies they embrace, and the babies they will hold and then watch grow old. But such particulars take time to explore, and detailed context blurs out in forward movement.
Today, however, it is a city that feels different from others by it’s decidedly winter (dis?)-coloration. The drab sky leaves the landscape of people and places like a photograph faded from hiding in the drawers of dressers tucked in unused rooms. Such darkened images seem to expose our foreignness to each other. I see in these people, these souls, strangers like “the people in old photographs— not … through a veil of knowledge and habit, but simply and plainly, as they were lined or scarred, as they were startled or blank. Like the dead, (I) could consider their histories complete, and… wondered only what had brought them to transiency, to drifting,” (Robinson, Housekeeping, p. 179). Today we are all drifters in these same grayed city streets; strangers both to ourselves and each other.
What do my eyes see when we pass? I see you as unknown, a face with a certain kind and degree of beauty, sketched out with creases from a multitude of smiles and frowns, eyes framed by bags from sleepless nights and the unknown thoughts that whispered you awake. But what I see is clouded by what I miss– the hidden details that make you as you are and as you will be. All I see are still frame snapshots caught in moments of moving time, pictured stories without the words to give birth to meaning and marvel, ecstasy, despair and dullness of heart. Our interior lives remain hidden from each other, as the sun is veiled by the charcoaled belly of the donkey who stubbornly idles above.
After that moment, when our eyes pass on streets, we will move forward in steps to catch other gazes. We will move on for we are unable to consider everyone’s starting point and final destination, or the paths they find plausible to move from A to B. It is but a moment. You must, I am sure, go about your day, and I must hop on a plane, and fly back home to the place where I know more behind the silhouettes of the people I love and loathe.
The sun crawls through the fog, and briefly lights up the city in Peruvian winter sunlight. For an instant, the masses are splashed in color, and all our particularities exposed. Together, we have big eyes and undefined chins, jagged noses and sunken cheekbones, pencil lips and widened hips. For a moment, we can’t easily abstract and blur away from each other in difference. We are exposed as mothers and children, fathers and friends. Our eyes manifest in tear-reddened tints, and the grins that lie beneath the surface give color to our faces and pulse to our souls. But then, just as quickly as it left, the donkey sinks back into place and the glimmer of depth again fades slowly from view.
But is not this space of our passing a touch more personal, at least for that moment? At the very least, don’t we at least stand in the wake of a realization that it should be personal. The details of your story remain mysterious to me, as mine are to yours, but I can at least know that you are a container of details worth knowing. Perhaps this is the moment where you become a Thou rather than an It, to use the language of the philosopher Martin Buber. Perhaps this is as it should be, as our eyes dance together in this jungle of concrete, brick, stone and glass; the two of us, for but a moment– inches away, and miles apart.
I sometimes find myself experiencing something similar when looking at an apartment building at night, with windows variously lit and unlit according to the schedules of the people inside them. To consider that each of those people has a life and a story just as rich and real as mine–that each of those people has a life as full of loves and loathes as mine. The volume of human experience in just that one building is more than anyone could grasp in a lifetime of befriending and beside-standing. I guess it comes down to something I find myself thinking in a wide variety of situations (many of which have no connection with these sorts of thoughts): this is a big world.