When I was pretty little—five or six or so, I think—I used to have a ritual I’d engage in that was designed to fill me with a powerful and uncanny sense of how big and wild and swarming the world was. Now and again, when I was out in a crowded public place with my mother or my father, I’d pick a person among the strange throngs who surrounded me. I’d focus all my attention on them. I’d stare and stare for several minutes (or as long as I could, before they moved beyond my sight or a parent’s hand beckoned me away), trying to memorize their face and their clothing. I remember particularly doing this once from an upper level of a shopping center, sticking my head through the railing that overlooked the lower atrium and watching a man reading a newspaper on a round bench. Then I’d hold the image of the stranger in my mind’s eye, imagining what they’d done that morning, last night, last week, to lead them to this moment in which I was watching them so intently. Who were they? What were their lives like? Where did they come from, and where would they go next?

I’d keep their faces with me for later, and then—home in my bed, or wandering the balcony of my apartment, I’d call them up again, and this was when I’d get the real thrill, the real surreal shiver I was looking for. I cannot explain how bizarre it seemed to me, and how amazing, to contemplate the fact that the random person I’d fixated on earlier in the day still existed right now, going about their private business, even though neither I, nor anyone else, perhaps, was looking at them. They had a whole complicated existence as real as my own, and I couldn’t know a thing about it, but it was out there in the universe nonetheless. It was a staggering thought. And if I wanted to multiply my delicious incredulity even further, I’d remind myself that all this impossible existence wasn’t just true of the single person I’d watched that day, it was also true of all the other people I hadn’t watched—all the people in the world. They all, every one of them, had differentiated lives as full and intricate and palpable as my own (though I may not have given them credit for being as fascinating).

I gotta tell you, for a small egocentric being who hadn’t yet fully developed a theory of mind, the whole thing was pretty much a beautiful mind-fuck.

Coming home from Argyle on the train today, I thought about this for the first time in a long time, and tried to recreate the observance. It was much harder than it used to be. I was still interested in the people I was looking at, but it’s a funny thing, I guess; the more strangers you get to know in your life, the less sublimely separate from each other they seem.