Wednesday, October 27, 2004
A Random Occurrence and the Random Observations Stemming Therefrom
Every day I walk down the streets of this big, anonymous city, assidulously avoiding eye contact with the thousands of strangers who dot its sidewalks, no doubt secretly planning to maim or rob me. But today at lunch I happened to randomly run into a good friend I haven't seen in years. And I'll be damned if afterwards I couldn't stop thinking about those fun little lines from Ezra Pound in "In a Station of the Metro," the ones that make freshman English students everywhere ask if something that short really counts as a poem, and if so, why that limerick they copied off the bathroom wall was received so poorly last week:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
There's definitely a magical quality to that connection between two people. If you think about it, to recognize, and be recognized by, anyone in this huge, overpopulated world is a little bit of a miracle.
And that's all I have to say about that.
Every day I walk down the streets of this big, anonymous city, assidulously avoiding eye contact with the thousands of strangers who dot its sidewalks, no doubt secretly planning to maim or rob me. But today at lunch I happened to randomly run into a good friend I haven't seen in years. And I'll be damned if afterwards I couldn't stop thinking about those fun little lines from Ezra Pound in "In a Station of the Metro," the ones that make freshman English students everywhere ask if something that short really counts as a poem, and if so, why that limerick they copied off the bathroom wall was received so poorly last week:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
There's definitely a magical quality to that connection between two people. If you think about it, to recognize, and be recognized by, anyone in this huge, overpopulated world is a little bit of a miracle.
And that's all I have to say about that.
