482
PARTISAN REVIEW
in the world he is traveling through and not in it. Beyond all doubt
he is in Metuchen, New J ersey during the few seconds the train
stops there, yet in what a strange sense is he there-he passes through
without so much as leaving his breath behind. Even if this is the one–
thousandth time he has stopped there, even if he knows a certain con–
crete pillar better than anything else in the world, yet he remains as
total a stranger to Metuchen as if he had never been there. He
passes through, the transient possible I through the static indefeasible
It. The landscape through which he passes for the thousandth time
has all the traits of the
ens soir;
it is dense, sodden, impenetrable,
and full of itself; it
is
exactly what it
is,
no more, no less, and as
such it is boring in the original sense of the word. It is worse than
riding a subway through blackness because the familiar things one
sees are not neutral or nugatory; they are aggressively assertive and
thrust themselves upon one: they bore. Whereas beyond the sub–
way window there is nothing at all.
As
is especially noticeable on the
subway, the partition exists as well between oneself and one's fellow–
commuters, a partition which is impenetrable by anything short of dis–
aster.
It
is only in the event of a disaster, the wreck of the eight–
fifteen, that one is
enabled
to discover his fellow-commuter as a
comrade; thus, the favorite scene of novels of good will in the city:
the folks who discover each other and help each other when disaster
strikes. (Do we have here a clue to the secret longing for the Bomb
and the Last Days? Does the eschatological thrill conceal the inner
prescience that it will take a major catastrophe to break the parti–
tion? )
Actually the partition is closer than this. It exists as well between
me and my own body. One's own hand participates in the everyday–
ness of the
ens soir
and is both dense and invisible: it is only on the
rarest occasions that one may see his own hand, either by a deliberate
effort of seeing, as in the case of Sartre's Roquentin; or through
the agency of disaster, as when the commuter on the New York
Central had a heart attack and had to be taken off at Fordham
station: upon awakening he gazed with astonishment at his own
hand, turning it this way and that as though he had never seen it
before.
To illustrate the zoning of the alienated train ride: suppose the
eight-fifteen breaks down between Mount Vernon and New Rochelle,
