Here are a few mood pictures from my journey home today from work. The first is near Sinchon station in Seoul; the others are closer to where I live.
Somehow on the bus ride home I was fascinated both by light and by lines. It is ridiculous how many surfaces reflect the many lights of a moving city and the interior of a full bus at night, and how much that light can shift and change with such detail. In this picture I like the dominance of the lines over the distant crowd of small people, the unidentifiable white splot (new word, somewhere between spot and splotch) on the first stripe, and the perspective provided by the lines.
I also thought of something I was told once, that psychologists have shown that lines do not exist out there in the world but are made by our brains. The person who told me this was incredulous about it; I'm still not sure precisely what it means. (What would it mean for lines to be "out there" in the world?) But we certainly make plentiful use of guiding lines in cities. Sometime during the ride, however, it started raining softly and stopped again, so that when I disembarked everything had more of a haze to it. The streets were also shining.
There is a book by a Proust scholar and philosopher called the Art of Travel in which he explains the appeal of lonely night-time scenes of transitional places like roads, train-cars, and hotels using the art of the Edward Hopper, whose paintings invite you to wonder about the solitary figures they depict. Most of his paintings are in transitional travel places that many would see as mundane; for instance, a gas station, an automat, and a hotel room. The man in the first picture passed me walking up the hill in this late night rainy scenery with a business suit and briefcase. It was probably the last leg of his day's journey from his apartment to work and back again, a period of involuntary introspection and quiet when there is nothing to do but put one foot patiently in from of the other to bring himself home. Who knows what is going through his mind - something in Korean, most likely. ;)
Photography is one of the most introspective mediums, but I don't pretend to be an artist in it. The pictures as shown here are as high quality as they're going to get; they were taken on a whim with my cell phone. I also noticed that the pictures don't end up framed as they look on the phone's screen when I try to take the picture, so when I get a picture I like it is usually pure luck. This last one is most like that; I just stuck the phone out of the window of a moving car this weekend during my trip to the southern coast of Korea. I was really lucky to get some of the Korean letters painted on the other lane, which is one of my favorite parts of the picture. I believe those are rice fields and a small bridge in the background.
And we'll end with some pictures near the ocean; I will soon be crossing that beast again at 30000 feet, though to the east, not in this direction, which is south. Those are islands that you see in the distance in the first one. There are quite a few of them in that direction, and many are developed just as the mainland.
Goodnight.
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