blog

I had been teaching all morning. On Notting Hill Gate I ducked inside a coffee bar for a latte and a moment’s rest. I took a seat where I could watch the people passing by outside. Notting Hill Gate, Saturday, midday: tourists gushing into the entrances to the Tube and being flushed out of the exits, all searching for El Dorado—Portobello Road.

While I was looking at the faces–laughing, talking, shouting, smiling, frowning–I was reminded of an astonishing passage from Seize the Day, one of, if not the greatest of, Saul Bellow’s books. Here Bellow is describing the thoroughfare of Broadway on the Upper West side of Manhattan, as it looked to him (through the eyes of his protagonist, Tommy Wilhelm) in the mid-1950s.

On Broadway it was still bright afternoon and the gassy air was motionless under the leaden spokes of sunlight, and sawdust footprints lay about the doorways of butcher shops and fruit stores. And the great, great crowd, the inexhaustible current of millions of every race and kind pouring out, pressing round, of every age, of every genius, possessors of every human secret, antique and future, in every face the refinement of one particular motive or essence—I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want. Faster, much faster than any man could make the tally. The sidewalks were wider than any causeway; the street itself was immense, and it quaked and gleamed….

The wonder of Bellow’s genius (freely on show in all his books) is that he can deftly marry pictorial description with psychological insight. Great writers are miniaturists and visionaries at the same time, and Bellow is one of the very greatest; it is one thing to describe a crowd in motion, but it is quite something else to enter into the minds of the crowd and to render the rush of thoughts and feelings, as Bellow does in this passage. It takes us out of the moment and projects us into the infinite. Undoubtedly this was Bellow’s intention. He wanted us to see all of humanity “antique and future” in one strike. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a thousand pictures could not conjure up what Bellow achieves with a dozen lines.

Was Bellow thinking of Purgatory as he described the crowd on Broadway? Perhaps he did not see people at all but lost souls swept this way and that by the forces inside them that were outside their control.

It is the paradox of the modern world that we appear to have greater choice and greater control over our lives, and yet, more than ever, we seek advice and help to live our lives fruitfully, as if the centuries past have taught us nothing, as if with every era we must start again and experience the same anguish and uncertainty about the world around us, whatever progress we appear to have made.

I sipped my latte and then had a surge of elation. (It wasn’t the caffeine—I drink decaf.) I was suddenly very grateful for my yoga; without it, I am sure I would already have been swept away by the fierce currents of modern life. Yoga creates space between me and the abyss. I closed my eyes and breathed in and out several times. When I opened them again, the sun was doing its best to shine—which in London in April takes some doing.

I took up my latte, left the coffee shop, and was swallowed up by the crowd.