Traveling by Metro is comfortable and fast, no doubt, but the Metro is also a blind journey. You see nothing apart from the Metro itself; behind the large and panoramic side windows… darkness. They overlook the damp and mouldy tunnel walls. The only things that appear now and then are the odd, bright and insipid high-tech LED billboards.
Often the whole journey looks like a closed circuit. The Metro is an underground connection between our home building to our office building. Spending time indoors soaked in the dazzling neon lights and noisy speakers sounds to appear later straight into another indoors.
One day the metro dweller will never see the city.
Dmitry Glukhovsky, a Russian-Israeli author and journalist, long ago wrote ‘Metro 2033’, a 2002 post-apocalyptic fiction novel set within the Moscow Metro, where the last survivors hide after a global nuclear holocaust.
Probably the plot is not so impressive today. Anyway, the idea came to Dmitry looking at how people lived in the actual Metro of his youth.
In Shanghai, I hardly take the subway, only to go to teach at Marangoni on Friday because it’s impossible to find a taxi in a “Thank God It’s Friday” moment.
During the first few years here, I was taking the Metro much more often.
But gradually, I became nauseated. I simply don’t like being underground.
“The whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key!”
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground
You know how it is. Inside it’s all pure and plain, too bright and too white that a regular eye can’t simply adapt to it. Linoleum floors, reflective and metallic wall surfaces, powerful neon tubes running on every edge and various coloured station names with resolute arrows to follow.
Meanwhile, everyone looks at their phones to escape the indifference and alienation you feel when you are in, crushing between thousands of empty shadows, and you too are an empty and blank shape floating on the shiny fridge-like escalator, waiting to be soon shot through the tunnel, like a bullet.
Clearly, you are not an empty frame. Neither are the others. You are a good and gentle person, an outstanding and talented individual. Still, you forget something about yourself in that mixture of pale light, plasticity, neon, turnstiles, escalator, and sliding doors. In the end, you become a silhouette.
