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Josh Wild
September 20, 2004
My head leaned against the pane of glass, smudged with the yellowy film of a thousand thousand fingertips and palms that once had taken temporary refuge from the frantic pace of the world above. My eyes were closed, and the vibrating hum of metal wheels on metal track slowly lulled me into a half-conscious stupor, like an electric lullaby. My hand rested in my left pocket, keeping guard. I wondered if my hair was going to be plastered to the side of my head when I got off the train at Earl's Court. Suddenly the train began its rapid deceleration, anticipating the stop at Gloucester Road.
The change in velocity shook me from my hypnosis, and I lifted my head from off the glass. When I opened my eyes, I immediately met the face opposite mine. It was a middle-aged man in a business suit. His hair was reasonably long in the back, even though he was balding on top. His five-o'clock shadow was threatening to become a moustache. More than a little, he resembled William Shakespeare. And the Bard stared directly at me.
I met his stare for a moment before timidly looking away. Desperate to avoid another such encounter, my eyes shifted around the rest of the car. All the other passengers were occupied with their books or their magazines or the backs of their eyelids. Everything was silent, save the hum of the car itself. I looked over my shoulder into the darkness. It was always midnight here. Still feeling his eyes, I resolved myself to answer back, to scare him off with my own piercing gaze.
I looked back at him. The Bard didn't budge. His gaze was half-piercing, but full of interest. He looked like he was on the verge of saying something. But he didn't; he simply sat there and silently inquired. The situation reminded me of Annie Dillard's story "A Man of the World." In the story, she recounts her experiences with Wu Fusan, a Chinese writer and intellectual who would stare into a person's eyes in order to read the depth of their "spirit." I felt in some way that I was being invaded and analysed. I couldn't understand how a person could attack someone else so violently without moving from his chair. I looked away. Much to my ashamed relief, the man got off at Gloucester Road. I spent the rest of my trip home wondering to myself what was so terrifying about a stare. The answer to that question may lie with a British author from the first half of the
20 th Century, who was very concerned with the "silent space that separates people."
Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a philosopher, and introduced Virginia to literature and philosophy at a young age. This introduction led to a lifelong devotion to books, art, and everything intellectual. She and her sister, Vanessa, were central figures of the collection of writers and artists known as the Bloomsbury Group. Following her marriage to another member of the group, Leonard Woolf, Virginia and her husband formed Hogarth Press., a publishing company that printed works by T.S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, and even Sigmund Freud. And eventually, Hogarth began publishing Virginia's own work. Quite appropriately, her first novel, The Voyage Out , predated Hogarth. In most respects, the novel was a conventional one, and, in writing it, Woolf realized the limitations of such conventions. All of the rest of novels, which she called "experiments," broke
violently from tradition to explore, in a depth more profound than any other writer before, the nature of human consciousness, making use of the stream-of-consciousness style to imitate the workings of the mind. And, by remaining so firmly in the heads of her characters, Woolf also explored the tragic isolation of the modern individual.
This isolation was given its strongest expression in her Modernist masterpiece, To the Lighthouse . The novel tells the story of a family, the Ramseys, as well as other characters revolving around the family, during a stay at a summerhouse in Scotland. The reader is given full access to all of the unspoken thoughts and hidden emotions of the Ramseys. The simplest comment takes on a dramatic weight when it is exposed to be the result of a tremendous amount of internal thought and anxiety. Near the end of the novel, Woolf develops an amazing conflict between Lily Briscoe and Mr. Ramsey, completely devoid of words, when the independent femininity of Lily battles to resist the aging Ramsey's appeals for sympathy and subjection. Woolf pulls aside the silence to show us the workings of the human mind.
Why, then, was I so intimidated by the man staring at me on the Tube? Perhaps there is more truth to the idea of the stare as an "invasion of privacy:" my mind, a literal stream of consciousness, had been content flowing along with its easy concerns about matted hair, fictional pickpockets, and smudged pains of glass, when, roused, I was forced to recognize the presence of another person, another consciousness. He forced his way into my mind, my being, and made himself the dominant presence. He also forced me into his mind, compromising the peace of my isolation, and causing me to realize that I was no longer simply "I Alone," but now also an idea set in contrast to the dark canvas of his mind. By staring at me, the man made me more conscious of myself.
I wonder what he was thinking. Maybe he had had a bad day and simply wanted some type of human interaction. Like one of Woolf's characters, he sat there holding my eyes, struggling inside over whether he should smile or not or say hello. But nothing was resolved, and we sat silently terrified, not so much of each other, as of the deafening silence between us. It takes a great deal of courage to bridge that gap, and maybe after I feel less like a foreigner in this city, I'll finally be able to make the jump.
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