Utrecht

Voyeurism and longing in The Netherlands

I came down with a terrible case of sonder on the train from the Amsterdam airport.

‘Sonder,’ you may recall, is a neologism from John Koenig and his exquisite Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (which I learned of from the equally exquisite Mike Sowden of Everything is Amazing). Its definition:

sonder

n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

Though I didn’t know the word for it back then, I’ve been susceptible to sonder for as long as I’ve been traveling. I have a very clear memory of the peculiar feeling that came over me on my very first trip abroad at age 19, when as I descended from the airport bus in Madrid’s Plaza Colón, and realized with a shock that all the people around me who were rushing off to work or out for coffee had been there all along, living their own lives, without me ever once really considering them.

They are profoundly disorienting, these moments when you recognize the fragile construction that is your own protagonism, and most of us, I reckon, can’t sustain the awareness for very long before we go back to asserting the primacy of our own narrative. But every now and then–mostly when I’m in transit–the perspective slips again, and I find myself pulled into the currents of all those other protagonists and their narratives, swirling simultaneously next to mine.

It was coming up on late afternoon when I boarded the train at the Amsterdam airport for Utrecht. Maybe it was because I was so so-evidently behind that lighted window at dusk, or maybe it was the peculiar loneliness of a commuter platform at rush hour, but as we traversed stations in those depressing conglomerations of glass-fronted highrises that cities perversely insist on call “parks” (as in “Science Parks” or “Innovation Parks”), the sonder came upon me. I could almost hear the internal dialogue of the woman with the mousy brown ponytail who looked like she still had to pick up groceries on her way home, or feel the pinch of the backpack’s weight on the wiry man who looked down the tracks in a way made me think he did not love his job. Too much of this can feel like slipping beneath the waves.

The announcement that we were arriving in Utrecht snapped me back to my own reality. But I suspect that something from the episode lingered, and that my railway bout of sonder had primed me for the voyeurism to come.