Living with strangers

Living with Strangers is an essay written by Siri Hustvedt, and in it she discusses the difference between life in the big city and life in the countryside. More precisely, she discusses the difference in social rules and her opinion on it.
Siri begins by briefly describing to the reader how one was expected to behave where she grew up. Whenever you encountered someone on the road, whether you knew them or not, you should always greet them. If you didn’t, you would be considered both rude and a snob, which was pretty much the worst thing you could be in that part of rural Minnesota.
When Siri moved to New York City in 1978 and she was met by a world vastly different from what she knew, and quickly learned that the social code of conduct was quite different as well. Greeting everyone you meet simply isn’t practical in downtown New York, as you are confronted with hordes of people every time you leave the apartment. On the subway, you are forced into such close contact with strangers that you can smell their hair oil, perfume and sweat, a level of intimacy reserved for lovers and family in rural Minnesota.
Another phenomenon of big city life, or coping technique as she calls it, is that whenever something odd happens in the public space, you simply pretend it isn’t happening.
She presents several examples of strange people doing strange things, and every single spectator simply minding their own business.
To give any kind of response is viewed as “courageous or merely stupid, depending on the circumstances and your point of view” (p2 l53), and Siri is of the conviction that “it is usually better to treat the unpredictable among us as ghosts, wandering phantoms who play out their lonely narratives for an au-dience that appears to be deaf, dumb and blind.” (p2 l50)
This attitude might have negative consequences, she argues, and brings up an example involving her daughter; after being harassed (or in a way complimented) by a crazy guy, she is petrified by embarrassment. While everyone else in the train pretended that nothing had happened, one man broke the silence with a joke about the situation. This let her know that there were, in fact, witnesses to the scene, and gave her “a feeling of ordinary human solidarity” (p3 l96), making her feel better.
Siri closes the essay by pointing out some of the beautiful things about big city life. “Sometimes a brief exchange with an unknown person marks you forever, not because it is profound but because it is uncommonly vivid.” As an example of this, she recounts an encounter she had with a homeless man who asked her out.
As I’ve said, the text is an essay, but the definition of “essay” is quite broad. I mean, I’m writing an essay about an essay right now. I’m pretty sure, though, that it’s an essay of the sort which in danish would be labeled a “kronik”, seeing as it was printed in a newspaper, The New York Times, and that it deals with the author’s point of view on a topic. And it is both an interesting and important topic. At no other time in the history of mankind have so many people lived so close to each other, and it is only natural that humans, who originally lived their whole lives in their little tribe, have to make some changes in order to adapt to and deal with big city life, where one is in close contact with hundreds of people every day.
As a person who has lived both among farmers and their animals in rural Minnesota and in the big apple, Siri is very well qualified to have an opinion on this topic. As for Siri’s opinion on the matter, it would seem that she is generally positive about life in the big city, but she doesn’t find the coping technique of choice for most people ideal.
She recounts two situations where people have defied the wall of silence, and she portrays both in a positive light, one where a man saves a subway train from an inconsiderate smoker and one where her daughter is saved from the awkward silence. She acknowledges that it is impossible to be open to other people all the time, seeing as you are almost never alone, but she urges to reader to sometimes break out of the shell and talk to a stranger, as every one of them is a real person with so much to give.
In Denmark the number one rule of public transport is that if there are empty seats elsewhere, you do not sit next to anybody, and if you must, you definitely don’t speak to them, because doing so would be an invasion of their private space and be considered very rude. The only people who break this rule are either insane or so old that this unwritten rule wasn’t around when you grew up.