What Is Glimpsed

Here we have nothing to detain us. There is only a place: a place without significance. It is somewhere we pass through on the way to somewhere else. It is passed by almost without noticing it, just used as a way of signifying distance travelled and how far there is still to go.

Of course, people live here, lives go on here just as they go on elsewhere, but we know nothing of these people or the lives they lead, apart from what is glimpsed from the car as we pass through their streets, hardly touching their lives in the same way they hardly touch ours. To us they are nothing more than scenery, part of the background. While, to them, we are just traffic, no different to the other hundreds of vehicles that pass through their day on the way to somewhere else.

It is as if two separate never touching worlds exist: those that stay in place and those that pass through. It is possible for us to meet and for some reaction to occur. We could stop and have some effect on their lives, and them – or some of them – to have some effect on our lives, but we do not. We have no reason to stop and their lives go on without us, like so many other lives in the world around us.

To ourselves we are the centre around which the rest of the universe revolves, but to others we are as insignificant, as unnoticed as the farthest, dimmest star in the most distant galaxy, and just as relevant to them and their lives as that usually invisible star.