People Watching: The Unofficial Favorite Sport of Writers Everywhere

One afternoon, during the two-hour break between my Art History lecture and this Professional Writing class, I take up residence on a wooden bench in the middle of campus. Between sips of tepid coffee, and occasionally jotting down sad little scraps of poetry, I set about one of the most universally pleasing activities known to man: people watching.

As I sit, I muse upon what it is that we as humans find so fascinating about watching others of our species go about their daily lives. There is of course some entertainment to be found in observing wild or unusual behavior in passersby, but such things are far from ordinary. Perhaps we find a secret reflection of ourselves in the actions of those whose lives pass briefly along the sidewalk before us. Or maybe we enjoy puzzling out the riddle of what has brought each of the figures we observe into our line of sight. John Gay writes about his attempts to read meaning in the faces he encounters in his lengthy poem Trivia, or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London:

Here I remark each walker’s diff’rent face,

And in their look their various bus’ness trace.

I, however, am less concerned with solving the mysteries of strangers and far more interested in noting the transformation as one class period ends, and the area in front of me becomes populated with students. The calm of the afternoon is replaced by the relative chaos of the break between classes the way that the tide comes into the shore; gently, then all in a roar.

It occurs to me as I watch the swell of humanity before me that people behave remarkably like water. They tend to move together, altering their path to flow around obstacles they encounter. Like runoff in a gully, they remain largely confined to their concrete canals, though sometimes a large crowd — like a heavy rainfall — can cause the edges to erode and overflow.