(no subject)

[nereidsecrets]

"CARAS FUGAZES NA NOITE. FLEETING FACES IN THE NIGHT. Encounters between people,it often seems to me, are like crossing of racing trains at breakneck speed in the deepest night. We cast fleeting, rushed looks at the others sitting behind dull glass in dim light, who disappear from our field of vision as soon as we barely have time to perceive them. Was it really a man and a woman who flitted by there like phantoms in an illuminated window frame, who arose out of nothing and seemed to cut into the empty dark, without meaning or purpose? Did they know each other? Did they talk? Laugh? Cry? People will say: that's how it may be when strangers pass one another in rain and wind; there might be something to the comparison. But we sit across from alot of people longer, we eat and work together, lie next to each other, live under the same roof. Where is the haste? Yet everything that gives the illusion of permanence, familiarity, and intimate knowledge: isn't it a deception invented to reassure, with which we try to cover and ward off the flickering disturbing haste because it would be impossible to bear it every moment? Isn't every glance of another and every exchange of looks like the ghostly brief meeting of eyes between travelers who glide by one another, intoxicated by the inhuman speed and the fist of the air pressure that makes everything shudder and clatter? Don't our looks perpetually bounce off the others, as in the hasty encounter of the night, and leave us behind with nothing but conjectures, slivers of thoughts and fictional qualities? Isn't it true that it's not people who meet, but rather the shadows cast by their imaginations?"
- Pascal Mercier (Night Train to Lisbon)