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Wed 1 May, 2013 07:49 pm
The greater wheeled traffic stood in two lines in the middle of the bridge. Around it and sometimes between it whirled the walking crowds: back and forth, up and down, round and round, dipping and swaying, nodding and bowing one to another in a strange ballet suspended between all other realities.
In this paragraph, a group of farmers has come to the Indian city of Calcutta and are crossing a crowded bridge. This is what they see on the bridge. What does "suspended between all other realities" mean?
Other realities would be their workaday worlds, the farms they work to earn a livelihood, their homes and families, their jobs or careers they're trying to get to in the city. Those take up most of their time and most of their interest. At the moment, they're separated from those things they see as their ends in life. They're just in transit. It's just an interim they have to go thru to get to what , ,they consider important in their lives, i.e. the other realities. If you're stuck in a traffic jam or a slow moving one, or in a crowd, particularly if you're on foot, you're likely to talk to the people around you, people you may never see again, and for a few minutes develop a small society of people, which will soon fractionate again as you move to your appointed tasks, your usual reality.
@MontereyJack,
Well done, Jack
I'm reminded yesterday sitting in the Dr's office waiting for my Better Half to emerge, sharing my newspaper with bysitter, chatting about the inevitability of bad news
….noting the fraction of folk just sitting there staring at the opposite wall (16%), ruminating over how many of them might be thinking as I; whether I should make this very report to my No. 2 Son, one of the few folk in this world whom I apparently don't bore to death
Except sometimes
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