Passages

Look at the photo. I took it many years ago in Beja in Portugal. It shows two men walking across an open space that keeps the middle between a street and a square. Many people like it. However, it is not only photographically a good photo, but it is also a meaningful photo. Why?
My blog last week was about waiting. A related idea is passages. While waiting evokes a feeling of a standstill and the idea that it is fixed to a certain place, passages evoke a feeling of going from one place to another or the idea of a connection between two places, or sometimes also events that we have to go through, like passage rites that connect two phases in life. All this is expressed in the word “passage”, which means “going through”. So “passage” adds movement to waiting. We can also say that passage is waiting on the move. If a passage is a space, like in the photo, passages add a physical aspect to waiting.
If a passage is physical, for example a street or a corridor, it makes that we can abstract from the aspect of time and that passages can be there when nothing is happening, which is not possible for waiting. Waiting always involves the presence of people; of at least one human being. We can talk about a waiting room, if nobody is there, but actually we see the space involved then as a passage; the waiting as such is absent when nobody is there. On the other hand, a physical passage can be a passage, when nobody is there, so long as the idea of being used by humans is present at least in the background. When this idea lacks, there is no (longer) a passage, but there is simply a space.
Passages are an important aspect of the physical infrastructure of daily life. Take a town. It is a kind of infrastructure of people living together at some place. Living together doesn’t involve that they all need to know each other and go along with each other, but these people at least share a common space to live and in addition they share certain functions which make them to some degree dependent on each other. There are shops where you can buy what you need. There is a town hall where people work who make that the activities of the townspeople can go on in a smooth way. Etc. Of course, towns are open infrastructures in the sense that everybody, including non-townspeople, can go in and out. With this superficial description I want to give you an idea of what I am talking about.
To make that the physical movements of the townspeople are not a mess (going to the baker or to your work; to friends or to a meeting, and so on), a town has streets, squares, canals, and the like. They are the passages of a town. Note that a passage need not be only a passage. The function of a street can also be that it has houses where people live; squares can also be places where people meet. Both streets and squares can have shops or they can be marketplaces. They can have been made for concentrating just there important buildings, like government buildings or museums. But one of the main functions of streets and squares is that they are connections. In this way, streets and squares are planned spaces where people can pass from one place to another. They are passages (maybe besides something else). They are not the only passages you find in a town. I mentioned already waiting rooms, which are a kind of indoor passages, or I could mention railway stations and bus stops.
I began asking why the photo of this blog is meaningful. Unlike the photo in my last blog, which I took only because I was filling my time because I was bored, I took the photo of this blog, just because of its meaning. This photo doesn’t simply show a space that is neither a street nor a square. I didn’t take it just because it shows a photographically interesting town scenery. No, the socially significant aspect of this photo is that it is a passage and that’s why I took it. That it is a passage is stressed by the two men passing the space. They are not just walking there. They are a bit in a hurry. Apparently, they are passing the space on their way from one place to another. They unintentionally stress that the space is a passage. And that’s what the meaning of this photo is and what makes it interesting.
You find more photos of passing taken by me here and here.