The background of each is black, the letters white. Bored eyes, accustomed to stimulation, tend to settle on even just a few letters. Each of them contains relatively few words, sometimes just one or two, and they are not only placed in the middle distance they are deliberately hung where you are supposed to see them. Lively advertising, flanked by lousy advertising. Bare-bulb light sockets next to, and superseded by, far more powerful fluorescence. A subway station is full of interesting things to look at. The middle distance, though, is not empty. If you’re not reading or playing a computer game as you wait, odds are you’re gazing into the middle distance, gaining strength from those few minutes when nobody is asking anything of you. The subway is (for the time being, anyway) mostly a place where cell phones don’t ring and e-mails don’t ping. Though the trains are noisy, and each contains a small town’s population at rush hour - nearly 2,000 people, a few of whom always have headphones blaring at loudspeaker levels - a commuter onboard can often recede, losing him- or herself in a form of privacy unique to a city of millions. The New York City subway, harsh and intrusive as it is, offers a paradoxical bubble of solitude to those who want it.
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