The Velocity of Passing

We are always in transit. Moving from one room to another, from one year to the next, as if the destination were a place we could finally inhabit. But the transit is the only thing that is real. The blur of the world outside the window, the way the light shifts against the glass, the hum of the engine beneath the floorboards—these are the true markers of our existence. We think we are going somewhere, yet we are merely passing through the spaces between things. There is a quiet violence in this constant motion, a refusal to be held by the earth. We leave nothing behind but the memory of a shape, a streak of color in the peripheral vision of a stranger. To stop is to be forgotten. To keep moving is to remain a ghost in the machinery of the city. What happens when the engine finally cuts out and the silence catches up?

Shirren Lim has captured this fleeting rhythm in her image titled Taxi. It finds a strange, frozen stillness in the middle of a city that never stops moving. Does the passenger know they are being watched?