On Surprise

This Saturday, I was wandering around London with my dear friend Meredith, who I've known since college. It was a stunning day, warm and sunny and preternaturally spring-like, and everybody was out, on foot, on bicycle; with children, with friends; wandering, talking, eating. We walked from Camden to Westminster Abbey via St. Pancras churchyard, where Mary Wollstonecraft is buried. I met someone here in Cambridge, an English student, who visited Wollstonecraft's grave on her first date with her boyfriend. He brought her flowers to put in front of the tomb. As she said, it's the kind of gesture that really tells you something about someone; it's definitive. I have to say, I'm not sure I'd be all that keen on graveyard dates, but maybe seeing Marx and his gigantic beard would be an exception.

We walked on to the Abbey, passing Big Ben on the way and unwittingly getting in more tourist photographs than we knew. Everyone was out and everyone was photographing each other in front of everything. Apparently there's a phone booth, one of the iconic red ones, in view of Big Ben, and tourists are constantly going into it and posing as if they're on the phone. This from a friend of Meredith's who works in an office with a view of the phone booth. There's something overwhelming about the constant stream of people taking snapshot after snapshot: seeing Big Ben of course brings Woolf to mind, because of the bit in Mrs. Dalloway where the clock striking sends discs through the air that reach the ears of Londoners all around the city; they synchronize all of the distinct consciousnesses for a moment. The idea of being brought into agreement by hearing the same thing requires as its counterpoint the bustle and dissonance of the city: everything going on constantly around you is held in suspension for an instant only, and then rushes back in.

After we heard evensong (so much gold leaf in that church!) we headed through St. James Park on the way to the National Gallery, where we had about half an hour before the guards professionally shooed us out. In one of the rooms at the National Gallery, there's an anamorphic box called a peep show: there are small eyepieces at either end, and if you look through them, you see the interior of a Dutch house with a woman (I think) reading. The side of the box is open, and if you look from that perspective, everything appears massively distorted: the chair in the corner is stretched to gigantic proportions, and the woman resembles a damaged doll. There's another anamorphic painting in the National Gallery, though I didn't see it this time -- it's a painting of ambassadors by Holbein, and there's a skull at the bottom which only comes into relief from a particular point of view.

Then to Monmouth Coffee -- where you can have something called a 'flat white,' basically a latte with less milk, which is among the best things ever -- and through Regents Park on the way to dinner in Primrose Hill. A long walk, but a nice one: walking is the best way to see cities, I think, because you happen on things you don't expect. For example, when Meredith and I were making our way through Primrose Hill, and were walking up to the hill which bears that name, we noticed a light in the sky above us that looked a bit like a floating candle. We thought it must have been some kind of homemade luminary that someone had set off from a balcony. But then Meredith spotted a whole group of people at the top of the hill lighting these miniature hot air balloons, so we walked up to get a closer look. The balloons were about three feet tall and two feet wide; after you lit one you had to hold it to let it fill with air, and then you released it into the sky. They flew fast and looked spectacular against the skyline, these flying torches making their way into the darkness. The people setting them off were drinking champagne straight from the bottle and were on their way to a fancy dress party, costumed as their favorite artists.

I was stunned to have stumbled on this, and said to Meredith as we walked on to dinner that this was one of my favorite things about cities, how they surprise you. I corrected myself to say that of course the surprise cuts in both directions; it's both good and bad -- we laughed as we remembered the guy in Italy who flashed us (from which I learned: always beware of Italians in sweatpants)! And it's not just cities that are surprising: there's a tree in the middle of the desert in Nevada, literally the only thing for miles and miles, and when you drive past it you're going so fast that you hardly notice and you have to turn back to see, but it's got hundreds of pairs of shoes hanging from it, because everyone goes there to throw their shoes over the branches. But how amazing, right? To see lit hot air balloons in the middle of London, a shoe tree in Nevada, a miniature replica of Stonehenge cut from the ice on a lake in Wisconsin -- such a good kind of surprise.

Here I fear that I'm starting to sound like Alain de Botton, and in an attempt to sound less like him, I shall close by reporting that on Sunday we saw Vicky Christina Barcelona, in which Penelope Cruz plays the best jealous lover ever (that woman knows how to do crazy). The film contains an amazing exchange between Scarlett Johanssen (the sexually liberated, experimental blonde who only knows what she doesn't want, not what she does) and her foil (the engaged brunette who is secretly ambivalent about her fiance). The fiance is saying something uptight about the love triangle ScarJo's gotten herself into, and the brunette fires back, "Not another turgid argument about the categorical imperative!" Snap!