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Like a school of fish
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I love little observations of the everyday like this one in Nick Paumgarten’s essay on elevators:

Passengers seem to know instinctively how to arrange themselves in an elevator. Two strangers will gravitate to the back corners, a third will stand by the door, at an isosceles remove, until a fourth comes in, at which point passengers three and four will spread toward the front corners, making room, in the center, for a fifth, and so on, like the dots on a die. With each additional passenger, the bodies shift, slotting into the open spaces. The goal, of course, is to maintain (but not too conspicuously) maximum distance and to counteract unwanted intimacies—a code familiar (to half the population) from the urinal bank and (to them and all the rest) from the subway. One should face front. Look up, down, or, if you must, straight ahead. Mirrors compound the unease.

This reminds me of what is quite possibly the best poetic description of riding the elevator, part III of T.S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” (from Four Quartets). In particular, it’s about the long elevator ride at the tube stop at Russell Square:

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Desiccation of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy,
Inoperancy of the world of spirit;
This is the one way, and the other
Is the same, not in movement
But abstention from movement; while the world moves
In appetency, on its metalled ways
Of time past and time future.

(Why hasn’t “Not here the darkness, in this twittering world” been quoted regularly?)

Another great bit from Paumgarten, which relates to my earlier “potatoes, paper, petroleum” observation about the 19th century:

The elevator, underrated and overlooked, is to the city what paper is to reading and gunpowder is to war. Without the elevator, there would be no verticality, no density, and, without these, none of the urban advantages of energy efficiency, economic productivity, and cultural ferment. The population of the earth would ooze out over its surface, like an oil slick, and we would spend even more time stuck in traffic or on trains, traversing a vast carapace of concrete.

A meta/editorial/critical note: Paumgarten’s essay has a regrettable B-story, about a guy who worked at a magazine who was trapped in an elevator. He dribbles it out graf by graf, to create the illusion of dramatic tension. Just speaking for myself, I didn’t care; also, it kind of bothers me that this is starting to become one of the default templates for magazine writing. Either find a reason to do it and do it well, or just… try something else.

2 comments

That quote about how people arrange themselves in an elevator reminds me of this machinima video on male restroom etiquette, specifically the part starting at 1:55.

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When I read that story a while back I did it in two passes – first to read about the guy stuck in the elevator, which sounded awful but wasn’t particularly interesting, and a second time to read the essay on elevators. The man stuck in the elevator bit should have been a sidebar to the elevator essay (or vice versa); instead it was like the reality TV show that inserts random “informative” filler to turn a 10 minute story into the 44 minutes needed for a 1-hour show.

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