End of the Line

The poet-keeper of the High Line is the photographer Joel Sternfeld. He has been taking pictures of it in all seasons for the past year, and he has a gift for seeing light and space and color-romantic possibility of every kind-where a less sensitive observer sees smudge and weed and ruin. The High Line does not offer a God’s-eye view of the city, exactly, but something rarer, the view of a lesser angel..
---Adam Gopnik.

I never quite get to the last stop but it's always there, shrouded in mystery. There, other people live. The strange lives of other people; so ordinary that your heart could break. The final stop on the central line borders an infinite white space and maybe has absorbed something of its nothingness. As we approach it the train driver announces: this train goes no further. All change, all change, please.

You won't find a new country, won't find
another shore.
This city will always pursue you. You will walk
the same streets, grow old in the same neighbourhoods,
will turn grey in these same houses.
You'll end up in this city. Don't hope
for things elsewhere:there is no ship for you,
there is no road.
As you've wasted your life here, in this
small corner,
you've destroyed it everywhere else in the world.
---Cavafy, 'The City'

Never make the mistake of dying in this city.
--Swami.

Never make the mistake of growing old, son.
---Ubo.

A path that is walked on long enough ceases to be a path.

The beaten path, the end of the line. We retrace our steps there. Just beyond the edge of the known world, the deeply familiar streets that you could run down blindly, is another place. Is it the origin or the nether land? Perhaps it is the promised land? Here one encounters reality beyond words and books, beyond the pretence of status and accumulated meanings. There's no time for that. If you speak at all, then speak plain English. Let your voice ring true.

You walk through the streets like a ghost. Things only seem vaguely different, as if the world had been displaced by a few degrees or the watches were all five minutes behind schedule. The faces are no blanker than others and yet an eerie feeling shimmers through the ordinariness reawakening the power present in all of us to become strangers to the map of places and paths that we call reality...

We, we latecomers have nothing to do but transcribe the words of others. Like the barbarians to whom we once denied entry to the city, we have dreamed with great longing for an escape. This other zone is a hidden, quiet corner of the universe. There we imagine we can undo the certainties of place and once again allow our destiny to become a direction, opening up to wide inner vistas. At last we will become comfortable in our own skin, and re-work all those settled materials; look lovingly back on all we knew and still find something unexpressed. This Late Style means becoming like one of Breughel's hunters, means returning to the world and looking at it from an angle, our unique angle, and realising that the world is not the world any more.

We go back to all that was unsaid. Return to texts we underlined, to dusty books, wondering why this page and no other has its corner turned. So much now seems unexplained. We look for other connections, those that were only dormant, like the bright veins of dazzling minerals set in stone. Try to remember all that was glossed over once again. And all this, let it be added, not to bring things to the surface, to a final resolution-for there can be none- but to deepen what we already know. Nothing is neglected. Every possibility is kept open in these acts of second-thought, re-vision....

A Late Style avoids linear narratives. The ink is not dry. To adopt it is to realise that one's life is infinitely stranger than it is. At the centre of all that strikes you as simply ordinary, plain, or mundane, is the most extraordinary of tales. In the final analysis there is no reconciliation and none is desired. An old man gently touches a flower, as he did when he was a child, and understands now that all life is precarious.

Millions have become strangers to themselves even before they reach this place. Disenchanted, they think untimely thoughts, not identifying with the place or time that has been allotted to them. This sense of lateness resonates with the promise of latent possibilities, the unfolding, ripening of certain potentialities; a trace of what was unthought, of all that was, survives. The line becomes a square, the point a circle.

Without a future, late man returns to those things he once loved. But this is not a final, homeward-bound journey. There are no more journeys, only a longing for what disappears.

Timelines.
Everything has a season. This place is run-down and for some of its inhabitants only survives as long as their memories do. With them the city will also disappear.