Crossing Linea D

Why do we see people from home in the faces of those in cities we visit? Why as I walk around Buenos Aires do I see people from my past and present life in the United States?

As we returned from an excursion on a crowded subway at 8:30 pm last week, I looked around and saw in the tired and bored faces of the portenos in our car, some listening to the blues in Spanish, others reading, the faces of random people from my life: Tim Crimmins (my old colleague at Georgia State University), Steve Porter (Amherst friend), Mike Gaebler (Yale friend), in the faces of the other riders. These aren't people I was thinking about in recent days, but somehow in travel, your mind opens up and makes connections.

You take your home with you and put it into the landscape -- even more, into the faces of the strangers that now surround you. I think of the title of Thomas Wolfe's book, You Can't Go Home Again, and think: your home travels with you, transposed into faces of your new, anonymous neighbors.

I am reminded also of lines from Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry":

Flood-tide below me! I watch you face to face;
Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see you also face to face.
Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes! how curious you are to me!
On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose;
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.

....

Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.

And a line from a book I am reading right now, Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann:

"It struck me that distant cities are designed precisely so you can know where you came from We bring home with us when we leave. Sometimes it becomes more acute for the fact of having left."