previous | next

The arch-pessimist E.M. Cioran, has a more dynamically dark picture of the crowd than the German provincials, Heine and Engels. His is a particularly Hobbesian view: "Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out every day: massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without destroying each other to death? As a matter of fact, the do hate each other, but they are not equal to their hatred. And it is this mediocrity, this impotence, that saves society." But there is too much evident relish here. Cioran thrills to his vision!

For me the crowd represents freedom, a source of energy; and, at the merely civic (rather than imaginative) manner it exemplifies that street-level Social Contract, by means of which we rub, literally rub along OK together; the free contract of the crowd, not the clinging contract of community. It is nice to move en masse, to obey and enjoy that unspoken consensus of movement; it gives me a feeling of camaraderie, of complicity with the person next to me, with the person I pass and will never speak to.

The crowd gives information. It is informative to feel the gradual thickening of density in certain streets of an unknown city, the direction of movement; you learn you are nearing some focal point: a market, a station. I am studying an aerial view of the New Year's Eve party in Rio; fireworks erupt from the Copacabana hotels that flank the ocean. In the photo the huge beaches have a curiously granulated texture that baffles me at first; until I realise that this granulation is a million people; it thrills me to know that one of these tiny pixels is myself, for I was there.

Notting Hill Carnival too, at dusk: smoke from the kebab stalls, starlings gathering in the skies, the thud of black loudspeakers stacked against the empty, well-bolted, stuccoed villas of Ladbroke Grove. Frightening densities in those narrow streets.

Crowds in Oxford Street too. Oxford Street; was it ever genteel? As the thoroughfare that led to Tyburn gallows its respectability is dubious; Ackermann's Repository (1813) calls it "one of the finest streets in Europe"; But Ackermann's was a daylit, indeed sunlit and stucco-ey vision of London. De Quincey, who had a more nocturnal, proto-Victorian view of the city, and Oxford Street in particular writes: "Oxford Street, stony-hearted step mother….thou hast, since these days echoed to the groans of innumerable hearts".

previous | next