[LINK] "Islands in the stream of consciousness: the people we never meet in Toronto"

[rfmcdonald]

Over at Spacing Toronto, Shawn Micallef reposted a column of his, originally from eye weekly, talking about Toronto's many solitudes.

Toronto is a city of neighbourhoods, we’re told. When they work well, they feel like a small town and, when they work really well, we might feel like Al Waxman in the opening credits of the King of Kensington, walking down the street like we own it. That’s all fine, but it gives us a false sense of the size of the city. Sometimes it’s good to be reminded of just how big Toronto is.

Try standing over an expressway. Anytime is good, but late afternoon when the rush is at its peak is best. The bottom of Dufferin over the Gardiner, right before the Canadian National Exhibition arch, is good, as is the top of Avenue Road where the 12 lanes of the 401 have been called the busiest road in North America. Every second, dozens of individual people pass by, each going to an individual home, some filled with more individuals, each with their own network of friends and coworkers. It’s a web that doesn’t stop growing, and watching the traffic and thinking this way gets overwhelming fast. Where do all these cars park? How many pairs of pants does everybody own? The numbers add up meaninglessly high.

Another rush-hour place to feel this more intimately is the Union Station basement at 4:45pm on any weekday. Try standing still in the middle of the thousands of GO Train passengers. It’s like a flash-flood mudslide and, if you don’t watch out, you’ll be swept up and taken away to Pickering or Newmarket. The mental aggregate of all this is confounding — we can see all these people, but it’s hard to know where they fit into “the city we know.” It’s too much.

Facebook helps make sense of people by organizing our networks, but do a bit of stalking of strangers — especially ones that seem to live in the same general part of town as you do — and it’s remarkable how many people you can find that have ridiculously high “friend” numbers — into the hundreds or even over a thousand — who you don’t have any friends in common with. That there is no overlap of these vast networks is as dramatic a sign of Toronto’s human depth as the 401 is.

We spend a remarkable amount of our Toronto lives in metaphorical tunnels and islands. We’ve got our social groups — the people we know — and well-worn routes between them that lead to an impression of knowing the “edges” of Toronto, but it’s an illusionary and parochial view. Toronto’s deeper than any of us can imagine, but the depth is in places we don’t pass by everyday: at Church basement meetings we don’t hear about, in North York strip-mall nightclubs not listed in this newspaper and at concerts that aren’t considered cool. Queen West hipsterland may as well be another country when viewed from Clubland. Toronto activist circles may never bump into Bay Street money folk, they just read about each other in the news. Yet it’s all Toronto.

We limit our Toronto experiences for good reason: we’d not be able to cope with knowing everything. Yet we (and I) often say “we” when describing the city and our fellow Torontonians in it. “We are despondent about the Leafs.” “We got through SARS together.” But what does that “we” mean if we have no idea or direct connection to all those people? This becomes especially apparent in an election year, when candidates try to talk directly to you, but also to 2.5 million other people. This city of small towns suddenly seems full of disparate strangers.

And still, Micallef observes, we find our ways to each other, and we can find still more ways if we try.

Go read the entire column for the rest of your serving of good Micallefish stuff.