Have you ever enjoyed a novel so much that you found yourself feeling sad at the realization that at some point it would be over?
I’m having exactly that experience right now reading Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One”. I was reading it on the subway today, laughing out loud at inappropriate times (people tend to get nervous when you laugh out loud on the subway), when some fool pulled the emergency brake cord.
When that happens, the rules say that a conductor needs to walk completely around the train, doing a proper inspection, before the train can start again. All of the other passengers sighed stoically, doing their best to wait it out. I must say they were all good sports about it.
But I wasn’t bothered at all. I was only too happy to be getting another twenty minutes or so to just sit there, undisturbed, while I read a little more of Cline’s fabulous book.
I just hope the other riders, trapped in that car with no way out, were not too made too nervous about the grinning madman in their midst, gleefully cackling aloud at random intervals.
I often felt that same level of awkardly shared space in my fellow companions of then daily commutes to Paris. Practically no one looks at what was happening around them (when alone at last, in group peoples tend to own their space more), looking everywhere but at the very place they inhabited when not plunged in their own personal realities, books / app / or gazing at the same eternal shapes at the brinks of the rails. The culture of Public Transportation.