Strawberry Fields Forever

Diary entry: November 24, 2024

There exists a peculiar human discipline, an art form perfected in the crucible of public life: the managed refusal to acknowledge one another. In Russian, this art even has a name, a stark and simple creed: Не Вижу, “I do not see.” 

This is not a failing of the optic nerve, but a kind of societal pact, a willful blindness. One can brush past a neighbor in a corridor or register their silhouette across a barren street and, by some unspoken treaty, render them invisible — a piece of the brutalist architecture. Everyone sees; no one acknowledges. It is a mutual agreement that keeps the world manageable, its sharpest edges pleasantly deniable.

But a razor’s edge separates the artful evasion of “I do not see” from a deliberate, demonstrable refusal to greet. Where the first is a permissible act of social camouflage, the second is a clear declaration of hostility. In some cultures, such a calculated omission would be an omen, a prelude to conflict. There, a greeting is not a courtesy; it is a mandate. To withhold it is the social equivalent of declining to shake a proffered hand — an act of profound and dangerous meaning, where the boundary between slight and threat is daringly blurred.

America, I find, practices a subtler variant. Here, you are seen — conclusively, undeniably — but the subsequent pretense of not-seeing is elevated to a sport. It is a precise choreography: eye contact is briefly made, then instantly broken, followed by the “straight-ahead gaze,” which implies that, actually, they’d been looking past you all along. A masterful sleight of eye. The same individual who, under the cover of night, might share liquor and flawed philosophies, who might sing with you in a gloriously discordant chorus, will the next morning drift past you on campus as if the evening were a fever dream, an intimate hallucination best left unexamined.

“Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see.”