A Strange Time to Begin
A Great Depression had descended upon us. Not necessarily the one with breadlines, bank failures, and photographs by Dorothea Lange, though at moments the resemblance seemed uncomfortably close. This depression had its own forms of dispossession and uncertainty, its own frightened calculations about rent, food, work, and what might disappear next. Gloom and despair did not announce themselves every morning with trumpets. More often, they settled into the background, a low and persistent hum beneath the mundane activities of everyday life. People still bought coffee. Buses still arrived. Dogs still inspected lampposts. Couples argued over lunch. Someone somewhere was always trying to parallel park. Yet beneath these ordinary accomplishments one could sometimes hear the machinery of a world losing confidence in itself.
What, then, does a sociologist write down when the taken-for-granted begins to tremble?
Perhaps that was the real question. He had always been fascinated by the small stuff: glances exchanged and withheld, greetings offered and ignored, bodies arranging themselves on sidewalks, strangers negotiating passage without collision, the tiny ceremonies through which people reassure one another that the social world remains intact. But what becomes of those ceremonies when the larger order begins to crack? Does catastrophe announce itself in everyday interaction? Does economic fear alter the choreography of the sidewalk? Can one glimpse the instability of global capitalism in the way a man studies the price of a sandwich, or a woman pauses before entering a store, or two strangers carefully avoid one another's eyes?
These were perhaps absurd questions. That had never stopped sociologists before.
So he would take notes.
He would record the grand convulsions of his time: fortunes evaporating, institutions staggering, political certainties dissolving, the foundations of global capitalism shaking beneath the feet of people who had been assured that those foundations were made of stone. He would listen to the economists, politicians, prophets, cranks, and television experts explaining why everything was collapsing and why, despite appearances, everything remained fundamentally sound.
But he would also watch State Street.
Especially State Street.
For history does not occur only in parliaments, stock exchanges, boardrooms, and presidential addresses. It happens while somebody waits for the light to change at Carrillo. It appears in the distance one person keeps from another, in a request for spare change, in the hurried refusal of recognition, in the peculiar blank stare by which one human being temporarily transforms another into scenery. The great abstractions—capitalism, inequality, precarity, despair—must eventually acquire bodies. They have to stand somewhere. They have to walk down a sidewalk.
And so begins our chronicle of a mild-mannered sociologist armed with little more than a notebook, an unreasonable curiosity about ordinary life, and the stubborn conviction that civilization reveals itself in its smallest gestures. He will contemplate the possible unraveling of the global economic order in the morning and, by afternoon, devote three paragraphs to the way two strangers maneuver around each other outside the Apple Store.
One must maintain perspective.
What will he discover in this new age of diminished expectations? Will the tremors shaking the foundations of global capitalism register in the interaction order? Will despair leave traces in gestures, silences, queues, glances, and encounters? Will strangers become more generous to one another—or more guarded? And what, exactly, should we make of those magnificent blank stares of passersby on State Street?
Stay tuned.
The world may be falling apart.
There are notes to take.
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