Early days of the pandemic: news reports from all over the world said there was no one in the streets. Thanks to lockdowns, urban cores had been hollowed out. Everything fell silent. In my hometown (Toronto), I walked the streets to see for myself if they were as empty and quiet and the news reports said they were.
It reminds me of an episode from Lewis Carroll’s Through The Looking Glass. The White King wants to know where his messengers have gone and asks Alice to look for them. We end up with this exchange:
“Just look along the road, and tell me if you can see either of them.”
“I see nobody on the road,” said Alice.
“I only wish I had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone. “To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance, too! Why, it’s as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!”
That, in turn, sends me back to an even earlier example of the same game. It’s the exchange between Odysseus and Polyphemus, the cyclops:
“‘Cyclops, you ask my name and I will tell it you; give me, therefore, the present you promised me; my name is Noman; this is what my father and mother and my friends have always called me.’
“But the cruel wretch said, ‘Then I will eat all Noman’s comrades before Noman himself, and will keep Noman for the last. This is the present that I will make him.’
After Odysseus gets the giant drunk and pokes out his eye, Polyphemus cries out to all the other cyclopes.
“… [S]o they gathered from all quarters round his cave when they heard him crying, and asked what was the matter with him.
“‘What ails you, Polyphemus,’ said they, ‘that you make such a noise, breaking the stillness of the night, and preventing us from being able to sleep? Surely no man is carrying off your sheep? Surely no man is trying to kill you either by fraud or by force?’
“But Polyphemus shouted to them from inside the cave, ‘Noman is killing me by fraud; no man is killing me by force.’
“‘Then,’ said they, ‘if no man is attacking you, you must be ill; when Jove makes people ill, there is no help for it, and you had better pray to your father Neptune.’
“Then they went away…
I wandered the city streets, but I couldn’t find no one anywhere.
