Random quote
The fool is fluttered at every word

Heraclitus (about 540-480 BC)

Passing and waiting

More and more I am intrigued by the simple things of everyday life, for often they appear to be not so simple as they seem on the face of it. Many simply daily activities appear to be basic. Look, for example, at the photo at the top of this blog. It is a picture of the hall of the most important railway station in the Netherlands: Utrecht Central Railway Station. I have used this photo before in another blog, but then in another context. Actually, I should have put here a photo of the Central Railway Station of Amsterdam or the one in Rotterdam, as will become clear in a few moments, but I haven’t such a picture, and this photo will do as well. The hall of the Utrecht Central Railway Station is not just an ordinary station hall of an average railway station. So it’s not just a space where you enter a railway station, where you can buy tickets, where you find a shop where you can buy magazines and books and maybe flowers as well and which maybe has also a small supermarket, and that’s it. Actually, such station halls have become somewhat old-fashioned – at least in the Netherlands – but that’s not important here. I’ll concentrate on two characteristics of this modern station hall. You must pass it when you want to go to the platform for your train. You can buy there train tickets. You find there shops. All this is like in an old-fashioned station hall. New is that you must pass through this hall from one side of the town to the other side, also if you are not a traveller (if you don’t want to take a long detour). Or rather this was so, when I took the photo, but now there is an alternative route that avoids the station hall, when you want to go to the other side of the town. But in Amsterdam you still must walk through the station hall for doing so in order to avoid a long detour, and in Rotterdam it is the same. This makes that in the photo above you see many people moving there, travellers and people who want to go to the other side of the town. The travellers are passing the hall when they go to or come from the platforms. Some are standing still for a moment for looking at the information panels: They want to know at which platforms their trains will stop. Those who don’t go to or come from the trains are just crossing the hall. Both the travellers and those who only cross the hall use it for passing.
Not all people are walking through the hall or watching the information panels. Some are sitting on the benches. Why? There can be many reasons why people are sitting there in this public space. Since the space is the hall of a railway station, at least some of them, if not most, are waiting: Waiting until they must go to the platforms for catching their trains; or waiting for people who will arrive by train; or waiting for another reason. Since Utrecht Central Railway Station and other railway stations have no separate traditional waiting rooms any longer, as old-fashioned railway stations had, the benches in the hall replace the waiting rooms that are not there. It’s true that also the platforms have benches and simple spaces for waiting for your train or for passengers that will arrive soon, but many people prefer to wait on the benches of the station hall instead of on the platforms.
So, two important characteristics of the station hall in the picture are that the hall is a space where people pass, not only for going to the platforms but also for going from one side of the town to the other side, and that it is a place where they wait. As for this, the Utrecht Central Railway Station is not unique. There are more railway stations like that, for example the Central Railway Stations of Amsterdam and Rotterdam (but, for instance, not the one in Antwerp, Belgium, or Gard du Nord in Paris). A station hall like the one in Utrecht is, what I want to call, a passage and it is also a waiting room or waiting space. Most of its other characteristics are dependent on these two main characteristics. For instance, the small supermarket there doesn’t sell what you find in the average supermarket in your town, namely your daily shopping, but it sells what you need as a passenger or a passer-by: fast food, sandwiches, drinks in bottles, coffee, sweets and such things. It’s the same for the other shops there and for the restaurants: they focus on passers-by and on travellers who are in a hurry.
Passing and waiting belong to the life of a traveller and generally to the life of people on the move. It is no coincidence that the station hall is both a space for passing and a space for waiting. Passing and waiting are two sides of the same coin. Passing is about space and waiting is about time, and that makes them different. However, passing can also be seen as waiting in space or waiting on the move. On the other hand, waiting can be seen as passing at the same placing so while standing still. Both connect past events to future events in their own ways. And just this makes them basic in life. They are the infrastructure of life in the abstract.

 Random quote
Thought is common to all.
                                                                     Heraclitus (about 540-480 BC)

Waste

Actually, it is possible to philosophise about everything; about what is lofty till about what is banal. Take Montaigne. He wrote about the education of children and about friendship but also about thumbs. Here I have written about Montaigne (of course), about the philosophy of Descartes (and criticized him) and about such an everyday event like passing a square (is it really a banal action?) or even about banality. Often, things appear to be not so banal and unimportant as they are at first sight. Take waste, trash, or garbage, or how you would like to call it. What could be more banal? For ultimately, we throw it away. But also in this case, the banality of waste (to use this word in this blog) is only superficial. Isn’t there a saying that “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure”? As for this, Henri Lefebvre, the French philosopher, who founded the philosophy of everyday life in the francophone world, wrote: “A social group is characterized as much by what it rejects as by what it consumes and assimilates. The more economically developed a country is, the more it throws away and the faster it throws things away. We waste. In New York, the garbage cans are huge and all the more visible since public services, in the homeland of election and free enterprise, function poorly. In the underdeveloped countries, nothing is thrown away. Every scrap of paper or string, every box is used, and even the excrements are collected.” (p. 338) Lefebvre wrote this in 1961, and although since then the world has changed a lot, and although it has been recognized that we waste too much and that waste is a problem and a threat to the world, in essence the tenor is true: What you throw away says who you are. The difference with 1961 is that in New York and everywhere else we still waste a lot but we throw things away in a different way: We recycle. Or at least, we pay lip service to recycling, for here in the Netherlands, for instance, plastic refuse is collected for recycling, but in fact it is only about a third of the collected plastic refuse that is really re-used; the rest is allegedly impossible to recycle for several reasons, and as yet it is burnt in the incinerators (as if a need for recycling doesn’t exist). This use of plastic waste says something about the Dutch, though I wonder whether it is different in the countries around the Netherlands. Anyway, really recycling plastic waste is apparently not important for the Dutch, for otherwise a solution would have been found.
Waste is the mirror of the soul, in the way we as a society deal with waste, but also what we see as waste. If you don’t live in a big town, at least you have been there, I assume, and probably you’ll have seen there people, usually drifters, hunting around for something in the litter bins along the streets. A good chance that they’ll find something useful, for people throw away a lot that is still useful for others, and maybe for themselves, too. They don’t take the effort to have it repaired, or they don’t like it any longer, because it has become old-fashioned, even if the object thrown away is still almost new. This says something about society (“we are that kind of people: consumerists”) and even more about the individual, both the one who throws away and the one who collects what is thrown away (“that person is like that”). Waste as the mirror of the soul.
These two examples show both sides of the waste problem: The social side – society doesn’t handle its waste well; it still throws away what could be recycled – and the individual side – individuals who throw away things that are still usable (and others sometimes collect this “waste”). A problem it is, for waste contributes to the global warming. In order to solve the waste problem, recycling is seen as a kind of solution, and in a sense it is: It makes that waste products are used anew, with the consequence that less waste is produced. However, for a part recycling is also a kind of waste; at least it is waste supporting, for so long as we recycle what actually was already waste (i.e. a not useful product) when it was produced, it helps to continue our waste economy. It functions as a fig leap for the bad conscience. The only solution is to stop producing what is not necessary (I know, the word “necessary” raises many questions, but we have made already a step forward when we start to raise these questions). And we must simply stop throwing away, what is still useful. Only after this step has been made, recycling will be a partial solution and no longer contribute to the problem. Should we ever come that far? In older blogs, my answer was “no”. I am pessimistic about stopping the global warming, let alone about undoing the global warming. But that’s another problem. If we would stop wasting what must not be wasted, we would have taken a leap forward. Can we? The quantity of waste we’ll continue producing will tell us.

Source
Henri Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne. Édition intégrale. Montreuil: L’Arche, 2024.

Random quote
An image is more expressive than words and more often penetrates deeper into the heart.

Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536)