Strangers in the Village

I'm staying in a bed and breakfast on Clinton Street almost in the middle of Center City. The population of Philadelphia is 1.5 million but I've always had the impression that Philadelphia was a collection of relatively small towns. That's not the case with this part of Center City. Piled pretty tightly on top of each other, people encounter a lot of strangers as they go about the business of shopping, walking their dogs, and exercising. And they don't like people looking at them. The people working in the crowded stores are friendly, but one suspects that most folks find their "villages" among their friends and families but not on the streets of their city.

In some ways, this is the exact opposite of Morehead, Ky. In Morehead, people are expected to look at each other because they're expected to make some gesture of friendliness. Whether you know it or not, you may be connected to them through family, schooling, or some community activity. Nobody is ever more than one or two degrees of separation from anybody else. In fact, someone like Mrs RSI can't really walk around town in any kind of expeditious way because she stops and talks to so many people.

But I think it's more the situation than the people. In a place like Morehead, the institutional interconnectedness is so thick that people hardly ever see a real stranger. So, they're friendly with everyone. In Center City, most people are strangers. Consequently, people develop ways to distance themselves mentally from the eyes and voices of people they'll never know. If more people were strangers in Morehead, everyone would live at a greater distance.