Distant Shores

I made some notes before I set up the blog to start thinking about India. This is from Saturday, July 18, 2009:

Walking in the city. Expected but still interesting things, like the gangly on the way to handsome adolescent mastering skateboard routines on the steps near the fountain by the AT&T building. He checks that I’m looking, launches a spin, it fails, he looks off as if the last thing he’s noticed is being observed; his expression registers nothing. He checks to see if he’s still in my line of vision, tries another, it fails, the same fascination with the horizon and not a muscle moves in his face. A lot of skill for a teenager, never acknowledging failure or embarrassment to observers. Girls do it with smiles, the other pole of concealment. I was reflecting on how much unoccupied sidewalk there is in Philadelphia on a July Saturday around noon from my house all the way to the Art Museum and back, 30 fast minutes each way. It’s clean, too, from the rain. Six weeks from now in Varanasi, it’ll all be different for me, intense and crowded and not swept clean. And hot. The familiar city entertains because it’s got an appealing amount of strangeness, very controlled against the background of what I know. Changes in the built environment take place on a different time scale than the streetscape, which ebbs and flows and laps the solid shores of the buildings and monuments, so nothing ever seems alarming. What will it be like not to recognize high and low tides in the social ocean.