If I’m alone, I stand in the center. If someone else is there, I take the opposing side. People come and go, I shift my feet unconsciously, keep my movements small. And so does pretty much everybody else.
Oh, elevators. Metal boxes on cables are wonderful places to watch people behave oddly. It’s nearly automatic, how we respond, how we dance. Someone enters and finds space. Someone exits, everybody shifts. Is it claustrophobia? Social distancing a priori? Imagine the terror if, entering an elevator, there’s a person in the corner and you walk over and stand an inch away.
Sometimes I like to enter an elevator and not turn around, just stare at the back wall. People become noticeably uncomfortable. I soon turn, because I don’t want to cause distress, but it’s still fascinating. Also, how conversations stop or quiet. How palpably tension’s felt. Elevators are for eavesdropping, they’re for smelling deodorant, the cigarette a woman in a winter hat just smoked. I love how elevators are so intimately social, they’re almost festive; perhaps by electing such close proximity, like in a movie theater, we’re all just a little more inclined to laugh.
And then there are the people who jam the “close door” button, no matter that those buttons were rendered nonfunctional in the 1990s by the Americans With Disabilities Act. (Maybe they didn’t get the news.)
I guess I’m lucky I’ve never been in an elevator that failed or plunged, or one that stopped between floors. I’m always waiting for the doors to open, wondering if they might not. Without elevators, what else do we lack? No skyscrapers. No wonderfully tense up-and-down scenes in Charade. It’s a box we choose to put ourselves in, an anxiety we select, and one of many people’s oddest, shortest commutes. When I worked in France, I rode an elevator from the lobby to the office, and it was a revelation how people would enter and say bonjour to everybody else in the elevator, even strangers, then exit saying au revoir or bon journee, or bon weekend, depending on the time and day. Americans are just so boring, I sometimes thought.
In tomorrow’s supplement for supporters
Pizza equipment and recipes I like for home cooking
Sixty-eight interesting works of fiction published in 2022
An old PBS series to explain the world
What the what
“Meditations in an Emergency,” published Saturdays by writer Rosecrans Baldwin, is a weekly mini-essay about something he finds beautiful, with a longer piece once a month for paying subscribers, written in the woods.
Also for paying subscribers: a Sunday supplement, three weeks a month, with three-plus ideas of things to love, no paid placements 💀
Rosecrans is the bestselling author most recently of Everything Now (2022 California Book Award), now available in paperback from Bookshop, Amazon, or your local store. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.
Books mentioned in this newsletter are featured on a Bookshop list.