The Geometry of Recognition
When observation becomes comfortable only at a distance
There is an account I follow on Instagram. It is one of my favorite outputs from the app. The algorithm knows it, of course: my almost involuntary likes and occasional comments make it something the app willingly pushes my way whenever it can.
It’s simple: people on the Paris Metro reading books. If it were a film, I would watch it before bed to relax. Just images of strangers on a train caught in solitary moments. Naturally, I like seeing the books they’re reading. But I also find myself fascinated by the person running the account — the unseen observer taking the video, later editing the book cover back into the frame in post-production. Meta glasses? Concealed iPhone footage?
Disturbing, a little. Especially because the account doesn’t always remember to blur faces.
There is no way I could ever get away with this kind of public voyeurism. I imagine there must be some law of social credit that permits certain people these liberties. Maybe if you live in Paris long enough and ride enough trains, people simply stop noticing you.
I was only in Paris once. My priorities were bookstores, the Louvre, the Luxembourg Gardens, and the Metro — all the places where you see plenty of people and speak to almost none of them except in the ways that count. Like the young man I sat beside in the Luxembourg Gardens while reading the Kierkegaard I’d bought at Shakespeare & Company. In the right place at the right moment, you discover silent languages for which there is no clean translation.
Like the boy in Geometry when you’re fifteen who reappears periodically. Not a love interest. Not a soulmate, but someone you recognize, who in memory becomes a recurring recognition at key moments. Why do we keep meeting in time but never really talking? Maybe because we don’t have to? Because I’m you and you’re me and we did this before and it’s fun to have this little secret, isn’t it? To meet in Geometry of all places. Points in infinity.
Les étrangers dans le train?
The allure of speculation and projection. It may be impossible to look at another person through such a window and not invent a thousand stories in your head.
In real presence with others — not through technology — self-consciousness interferes with observation. Maybe that’s part of why we increasingly choose to remain occupied in public. We are afraid to speak to the stranger beside us because we don’t know what will look back: acceptance, rejection, judgment.
So increasingly we retreat inward. We become more still while the train keeps moving.
The train itself becomes an entity on a track, woven into an infrastructure connecting the points in time that make up a life. All lives. Infinite reality.
Yesterday I was struck by a post showing a man reading Une histoire du théâtre by Philippe Tesson. He looked about a quarter of the way into the book. Leaning forward. Reading glasses sliding slightly down his nose. Probably the after-work commute, if the slouch and subdued exhaustion were any indication.
I clock the details: black walking shoes tightly laced, thin socks losing the war against gravity, a scuffed black briefcase between his feet with brass-colored buckles. Teacher, probably. Someone who walks quickly. Someone accustomed to lectures and meetings and deadlines. The cream denim pants slightly askew at one knee. Married. A real watch with a leather band instead of an Apple Watch counting steps and heartbeats. Valuable technology, certainly — but this man does not seem to need motivation to move. He already has somewhere to be.
Fifty, maybe. Reddish hair. Furrowed concentration. Fit not in the sculpted sense, but in the practical one: walking, breathing, surviving the daily Parisian machinery.
What does he teach? Acting? Stagecraft? Aesthetics? Did he write a dissertation on Chekhov and domestic life? Tennessee Williams and southern manners? Is he even French?
Jorge Luis Borges would have made an entire labyrinth out of this man and his theatre book. The book itself would travel. Change hands. Contain notes in the margins from previous readers. Perhaps a sentence written on one of the blank pages years ago by someone who understood they would never be seen again except through traces.
Oh, no, Borges would have them meet again. Everything happens again. Even parallel lines that never intersect will begin to mirror each other.
Two people at different points in time: one sitting on a train, lost in his reading and his thoughts; the other observing him through an app and inventing a story that perhaps the same man someday reads himself.
Maybe years later he finds it accidentally in a science fiction novel left on a café table. Or maybe the recurrence is smaller than that. Maybe it’s only the shoes that reappear in a secondhand store window. The briefcase at a flea market. The theatre book resold online with unfamiliar handwriting in the margins.
The objects continue the conversation long after the people lose touch.
You may have guessed it: yes, I’ve been reading a good bit of Borges lately. This is the first time I have put my thoughts about his patterns in a long-form post, but I’ve already made some Notes, embedded below — four different Notes, all connected to each other, because connection is what it’s all about?