Recently I saw a man on his hands and knees, moving with slow determination down an alley in Temple Bar. It was late and there was a cold wind blowing in from the river. I would have carried on walking but I was with two friends, and one of them went over to check whether the man was okay.
When we reached him, he looked up at us with confused hostility. “Hey, man, are you okay?” my friend asked. It took a while to get anything out of him. He was missing his phone and wallet; he couldn’t remember where he was going. Then he put his face on the floor and howled. My friend called an ambulance, and as we were waiting, the howling stopped. We turned him around and shook him, but he wasn’t responding.
At that moment, three people turned the corner and approached us. “Is he okay?” one of them asked. Another one bent to take his pulse, waited a bit, and said nothing. Then he took a phone from his back pocket and opened the man’s eyelid to shine the torch into it. It didn’t look like his pupil was constricting.
The third person said, “Maybe it’s heroin?” It was one of those irrelevant comments that bubbles up out of the depths of dread, but it turned out to be exactly the right thing to say because the man, who had given every indication of being dead just seconds before, revived to defend himself. “I never touched drugs!” he shouted. “I never in my life touched drugs!” He looked up at my friend, who was crouched above him, and spat, “F**king Brazilian! Go home!” My friend, who is Turkish, gave us all a big smile and said, “Hey, I think he’s okay!”
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There was an atmosphere of celebration. We propped him up against a doorway. Somebody gave him a cigarette. The ambulance arrived.
A few days later, I was taking a Luas headed into town, and a lot of people got on who must’ve been doing their Christmas shopping, because they boarded the busy carriage with big rustling bags, and I was pushed further into the aisle, directly above a man who sat looking down at his phone. He was on Tinder. He spent a few seconds flicking through the photos on each profile before swiping left. He must’ve adjusted his age settings carefully, because all the women looked quite young.
The man was in his mid-50s. His hair was missing at the temples and the skin there was shiny. At the top of his head was a circle where it grew thinner and silkier, like babies’ hair. There was hair also on his fingers, noticeable against the blotchy pallor of his skin. He wore a rainproof coat, the practical kind you might wear to go into the wilderness, where you wouldn’t expect to meet anyone.
I had to get out at the next stop, but the whole time I was watching him, the man didn’t once swipe right, or falter in his pace. By the time I got out of the carriage, he must’ve rejected every young woman in Dublin. I turned as the doors were closing to get one last glimpse of him. There he sat, his face grim and expressionless, as if he had been set a task that he must see through to the end, though he took no pleasure in it.
One last story: I was working in the vintage clothes shop where I sometimes pick up shifts. It was busy, but nearing closing time, and already dark outside. An older woman came into the shop, and stood for a while by the entrance, admiring the selection of silk scarves and ties. Then she asked to look at the gloves hanging behind me. I took them out for her and laid them across the counter. They’re not the kind of gloves that are meant for winter. They’re the kind that are meant for women in long dresses to wear as they stand on balconies, smoking out of cigarette holders. That woman would have worn them well.
We know that every person who walks past us on the street is as real and human as ourselves. It’s a truth so widespread that we are insulated from it
There was some commotion outside, and we both turned to look. A man was running on the pavement, and a garda came out suddenly in front of him, pushing him to the ground. Then the three gardaí who had been chasing behind him entered the frame and jumped on him. Everybody in the shop went towards the door to watch. We could hear the man shouting and the staticky voices on the walkie-talkies, and a siren approaching.
When the car arrived, two more gardaí got out, and the ones who were holding the man down lifted him and turned him around. He was wearing Canada Goose, and the sleeve must’ve torn because a gust of wind came and tiny white feathers flew up out of his arm and started swirling around, caught in the flashing lights of the patrol car.
After they drove off the spell was broken, and everybody in the shop returned to themselves. The woman who had been looking at the gloves said: “How awful,” and there was a murmur of agreement. Then she said: “There were too many of them, the lad didn’t stand a chance.” And once again, everybody murmured in agreement.
For those of us who live in cities, our lives are all tangled together. Little encounters like these happen every day, and they mostly go by unrecorded. Recently, I’ve been reading Maeve Brennan’s sketches of New York, which she wrote over the course of almost three decades, from 1954 through to 1981. She captures ordinary people around the city in precise, photographic language. Brennan calls them ”snapshots”, and it’s as if these people are lit for a moment and seen very clearly in the camera’s flash, before sinking back into the unknown drama of their lives. A trombonist from the Latin Quarter performs on a rooftop in Broadway. A pair of teenage lovers argue on a bench in Washington Square. A man gets up to speak at a Vietnam protest. A homeless woman gives back change because it’s too much. A beautiful old building is knocked down. An ugly new one is put up. Brennan captures the changing texture of a city and the atmosphere of that time, but the snapshots also reveal patterns in her noticing, and so they build an indirect self-portrait.
[ Maeve Brennan, a writer who was at home in neither Ireland nor AmericaOpens in new window ]
These pieces of Brennan’s were first published in The Talk of the Town column in The New Yorker, a column that can be a little too sparkling, too self-consciously charming. One reviewer describes Brennan’s persona in these columns as dreamily benevolent – but that’s not right, even if Brennan herself wanted to pretend that’s what she was up to. In her author’s note to the 1969 edition, she wrote: “these 47 pieces are the record of 47 moments of recognition… Moments of kindness, moments of recognition – if there is a difference it is a faint one.”
There is a difference and it is not a faint one. Brennan’s pieces are not kind, at least not in the easy way implied. Often she fixates on scenes of cruelty: a group of people laughing at a man with one leg, a man humiliating a woman in a restaurant, a cage of dying birds. She interferes to help the birds, but never the people. If she did, the stories would be pretty tedious. On the few occasions she’s directly called on for an act of kindness, she holds back. A lonely man approaches her to strike up a conversation, having been rejected once already, and she declines. She would prefer to be left alone. Another time, a child asks for her autograph, mistaking her for someone famous. She refuses and the child is visibly upset. The mother asks this time, pointedly. Can’t she just pretend? It would cost her nothing. Again, she refuses. She doesn’t say why.
She walks around, noticing people, recording conversations, moving from one little restaurant to another, waiting for the traffic light to change, and finally she brings herself to say it: ”There are too many people.” There it is. The thorn is out.
The question is how to view others with the right level of compassion. Living in a city forces us to reckon with this question every day. We know that every person who walks past us on the street is as real and human as ourselves. It’s a truth so widespread that we are insulated from it, by which I mean that we can know it without ever having to experience its force. The implications of living out that truth are scary. To recognise myself in the man crawling through Temple Bar with bitterness in his heart and a sense that the life that should have been his has been wrongfully taken by some Brazilian – that is a hard thing to do, and I would rather walk by, as I surely would’ve done if my friend hadn’t been with me. And once I admit that his pain is no different from the pain I would feel in his situation, that his situation might be mine more easily than I would like to admit, then I leave myself open for a whole tide of human misery to come rushing in, and that’s no way to live. I have things to do, for one.
What Brennan records in these snapshots of a city is the struggle to keep the knowledge of each person’s humanity at the forefront of her mind without letting it swamp her. It’s a delicate balance, and requires constant calibration.
Ruby Eastwood is a postgraduate student at Trinity College Dublin