No schadenfreude, just plain apathy

The other day, I saw someone trip and fall in Oakland. I watched this person fall then I… The other day, I saw someone trip and fall in Oakland. I watched this person fall then I turned back to the book I was trying to finish before class. A few moments later, walking down Fifth Avenue in front of The Book Center, I carefully walked around a girl who had collapsed in the middle of the sidewalk and was grasping her ankle in apparent pain. The next day, while I was happily running from my car to my apartment – don’t ask me why I was running, it just felt right at the time – my battered Chucks caught an uneven edge of the sidewalk and I fell, mid-movement.

It was a spectacular fall; I’ll admit that much. I got a bit of air from the trip and so, off-balance and uncoordinated, I floated through the air above the sidewalk. For one glorious moment, I thought I was going to pull it off. I just might not fall face first onto the sidewalk. This was not to be. My furious attempts gave way to failure. A tiny spread of cement induced cuts upon my palms as gravity and velocity showcased their terrifying power on my clumsy body.

Don’t worry about me. I was completely fine. A little beat up, but in that reaffirming way. I experienced the sensation you can only get from your body responding to pain by giving you some of those sweet, sweet endorphins. Those very endorphins that make you feel absolutely wonderful and make you wonder how you can convince your neurons to start firing that machinery up all of the time.

As I lay on the ground, twitching a little, my keys a few feet away from my body, a car drove by in a tellingly slow way. A sort of crawl that suggests that the person inside the car had not only seen the fall but also didn’t care whether or not I, important me, was ok.

This story isn’t meant in the kind of “They came for the trade unionists, but I wasn’t a trade unionist” way, or to illustrate how the sins of the pedestrian are visited upon that self-same pedestrian. Instead, this story is offered for a completely different reason. I mentioned me ignoring possibly injured people and then being ignored because I feel that sort of attitude is a necessary trait to possess if one is to live in a city.

Let me explain. I used to live in New York, which is a great city, if a little prohibitively expensive and crazy. The first thing I learned about living in crowded environments with lots of stimuli is that one has to stop caring about things. To illustrate my point, my commute into Manhattan entailed traveling through a walkway in Grand Central every day. What’s weird about that? Oh, I don’t know, not too much. Maybe just the consistent presence of at least two guys who were each missing an arm and playing their harmonicas. Some days, there would be more than two. Once I counted seven.

It was always so strange and I could never figure it out. Why did they all stand in a row? Why there? Why harmonicas? Why not, oh I don’t know, use a small keyboard? And why were so many people missing an arm? It’s not like I was in Rwanda. Ouch – sorry about that. But still, when I first saw the phalanx of armless men, I felt bad. I felt horrible. I would stare at my own arm and bemoan its duality. I felt guilty that I was two-armed.

This feeling didn’t last long. On days I was running late I hurrying in, freaked out and pissed off, and I would see the one-armed, lonely harmonica men and think: “Oh, for God’s sake, why can’t you regenerate your arm like a lizard? Or at least become a better harmonica player?” In other words, I had stopped caring. It was as if I realized that my heart had a finite amount of room for worrying about abstract things and if I kept worrying about those guys, I would explode.

Salman Rushdie discusses this phenomenon in his novel “Midnight’s Children,” calling this sort of vision as possessing “city eyes.” When you have city eyes, he writes, you “cannot see the invisible people-the beggars in boxcars don’t impinge on you, and the concrete sections of future drainpipes don’t look like dormitories” because you have learned that in order to exist you can’t see everything all of the time.

This is how I learned that I couldn’t care about people falling, or why I can’t get mad if someone doesn’t care if I fall. People are always falling; you can’t catch all of them.

Kevin Sharp has fallen and he can’t get up. Fortunately, he can reach his laptop. E-mail Kevin at kjs34@pitt.edu.