The bus at the end of the world

On Avenue Road, Past Highway 401, the street seems to peter off into a quiet suburb. It is as though the street ends in a quiet whimper,  replaced with the silence of residential areas. It is a place full of hedges, and separated from the highway by a stone edifice. Off in the distance, one can see in the horizon the city skyline of North York, past Yonge and Sheppard and moving towards Steeles Avenue. Cars are going down the 401, filled with excited people waiting to breathe in the city life.

A lone bus sits quietly in a small circle. It is the 61 bus, and it heads toward Eglington. The driver says that he will not be leaving until 30 minutes.  I almost begin to feel as though this were a kind of final stop in the city to end all stops. And the bus takes on the symbolic meaning to me. It seems to take on an attitude of dereliction. And walking past the bridge along the 401, I get another sense of the bird’s eye view of cars. The cars evoke the meaning of an accelerated life, and something that is somehow impersonal. Even though the cars are really only objects, I endow them with a symbolic meaning of a fast pace, and a machine-like side of the city. Standing above those cars gives me a very different sense of  life in the city. It evokes the transience of what people do, where they go, and what they attend to. And it looks so anonymous there. Personality somehow gets parcelled out into these metallic boxes on wheels. I never learn where the people go. The lights in the city fade off into the distance.

What I experience here is something like the erasure of self. It is quite scary but at the same time there is something quite interesting about seeing the city as a kind of collective organism. This experience is that of knowing that everything has its own spirit. But if I spend my time absorbed in my schedule, or my thoughts, I miss the unusual spirit of the city. Even neighbourhoods have their own special essence. Avenue and Lawrence looks so different from Avenue and Wilson. Yet, they are not all that far away at all. Each place also has its own special enchantments. Avenue and Lawrence, for example, is filled with art galleries and sushi places. The art store has pictures of what the art would look like in one’s living room. Here, art decorates, it functions in the midst of other materials around it, and it fits into someone’s vision of the good life, which they share with their friends and neighbors. And in Avenue and Wilson, there are no such galleries. There is the Harvey Kalles Real Estate Office in big green letters and the Armour Heights Library, but other than that, it is quiet and residential. But it has its own intrinsic feeling.

When you walk long enough down these lanes, you might start to feel you will lose your way of speaking and even your language. Communing with the city, I start to realize that many problems I experience are created because I want to believe that this body and these memories are going to last. I attach significance to ideas and then say this is ‘my’ domain, then imagine situations that might threaten this domain. I create a wall, and guard that wall against the imaginary intruders: the threat of anonymity that surrounds this ‘me’. But after walking here, how do those thoughts feel? They feel far away and a bit unreal. They feel like they could just as well be other thoughts. And they feel invented to protect me from that feeling of anonymity when one crosses a bridge and sees a line of cars below.

As I arrive home, I sense a kind of panic, or  a feeling of disorientation. I realize that travelling north to Avenue Road on a weekend gives me a very unusual feeling. I try to get my bearings by trying to go back to some familiar sense of who I am. But I wonder if it perhaps is more exciting to leave it at that, and to venture into the unknown again.