8
" Above all there's a lack of personal discipline, manners, decorum, natural discretion. If everyone causes their own individual catastrophes, how can there fail to be more general catastrophes? After all, the passengers on a bus or streetcar make up a community of a kind. But they don't see it that way, not even in a moment of danger. As they see it they are bound always to be the other's enemy: for political, social, all sorts of reasons. Where so much hate has been bottled up, it is vented on inanimate things, and provokes the celebrated perversity of inanimate things. Sending experts into other countries won't help much, so long as each individual refuses to work out his own personal traffic plan. There is a wisdom in the accident of language by which there is a single word, "traffic," for movement in the streets, and for people's dealings with one another. "
― Joseph Roth , What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933
9
" I have come to know one or two apartments near certain stations really
quite well. It’s as if I’d often been to visit there, and I have a feeling I know
how the people who live there talk and move. They all have a certain
amount of noise in their souls from the constant din of passing trains, and
they’re quite incurious, because they’ve gotten used to the fact that every
minute countless other lives will glide by them, leaving no trace.
There is always an invisible, impenetrable strangeness between them and
the world alongside. They are no longer even aware of the fact that their
days and their doings, their nights and their dreams, are all filled with noise.
The sounds seem to have come to rest on the bottom of their consciousness,
and without them no impression, no experience the people might have, feels
complete. "
― Joseph Roth , What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933
10
" I have come to know one or two apartments near certain stations really quite well. It’s as if I’d often been to visit there, and I have a feeling I know how the people who live there talk and move. They all have a certain amount of noise in their souls from the constant din of passing trains, and they’re quite incurious, because they’ve gotten used to the fact that every minute countless other lives will glide by them, leaving no trace. There is always an invisible, impenetrable strangeness between them and the world alongside. They are no longer even aware of the fact that their days and their doings, their nights and their dreams, are all filled with noise. The sounds seem to have come to rest on the bottom of their consciousness, and without them no impression, no experience the people might have, feels complete. "
― Joseph Roth , What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933