We are as forlorn as children lost in the woods. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours. And if I were to cast myself down before you and weep and tell you, what more would you know about me than you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful? For that reason alone we human beings ought to stand before one another as reverently, as reflectively, as lovingly, as we would before the entrance to Hell.
Franz Kafka, Letter to Oskar Pollak, November 8, 1903
Look at this magnificent cathedral to American motion, this Beaux Arts dream where everyone’s pretending they’ve got somewhere urgent to be. Grand Central Terminal (and yes, it’s Terminal, not Station, a distinction that matters to exactly nobody hustling for the 5:47 to White Plains) exists in this perpetual state of orchestrated chaos that would make John Coltrane weep.
Grand Central Solipsim
The photograph captures what the architects never intended: that moment when all that frantic purposefulness dissolves into pure geometry. Those vast windows aren’t just letting in light; they’re staging an interrogation. Every commuter becomes a silhouette, flattened into their own personal film noir, trudging through beams that don’t give a damn about their quarterly reports or dinner reservations.
Kafka nails it in that letter about standing before each other like we’re at Hell’s entrance. Grand Central is where that cosmic loneliness gets mainlined into the American bloodstream twice daily. All these bodies moving through space, each one convinced they’re the protagonist, the camera following their story through this temple of transit. Meanwhile the ceiling’s got zodiac constellations painted backwards, some gilded fuck you to astronomical accuracy, because even the stars here exist only in relation to the observer below.
There’s an honesty to it. No bullshit about connection or community. Just light and shadow and the acknowledgment that we’re all lost children in marble clad woods, checking our phones to avoid eye contact with the abyss. The terminal doesn’t pretend otherwise. It just keeps that astronomical clock ticking, those information boards flipping, that light streaming through like it’s searching for something it’ll never find.
Pure. Relentless. True.