Morning Reflection: The Deprivatization of Grief

Do you remember the telephone booth? I do, of course -- I'm old enough. You can still find them in the lobbies some old and elegant hotels and selected aging government buildings. But they are, alas, becoming ever scarcer, as venues such as these gradually undergo their inevitable renovations into congruence with the twenty-first century.

For those of us above a certain age, rather mundane-looking offerings like the one at the left can be unexpectedly evocative. Entering a phone booth -- particularly one of those old polished wooden boxes with its own wooden seat, rubbed to a dull luster through decades of use by miscellaneous bottoms attached (proximally or distally) to miscellaneous minds sealing miscellaneous deals, patching miscellaneous frayed relationships, or making miscellaneous "clean breaks" -- entering such a booth was akin to a brief trip back to a well-ordered, fluorescently lit womb. You would close the door, the booth's overhead light would flicker on, its fan would whirr into action, and there you were: perfectly alone, with only a phone, the White Pages, and your own breathing for company. You might be destitute; you might have just lost a fortune that took a lifetime to win; your entire emotional infrastructure might have just collapsed beneath you, leaving you in free-fall; but in that booth you had one thing that, for a few moments, no one could take away from you. Privacy.

Of course, phone booths of the type I extol above have been undergoing a slow decline for decades. Even twenty years ago, bottom-line pressures had pushed their replacement with more open street-corner phones like the one at right. These didn't have quite the privacy of the old booths, but you could, by pressing yourself in close to the phone, cupping your hand over the mouthpiece, and speaking into the small cave that protected the equipment from the elements, pretend that you still enjoyed some of the old privacy of the free-standing booth. (That is, if you could find a street pay phone that worked.)

You know where this is going, of course.

The cellphone is rapidly making even common street pay phones like this one obsolete. I still don't have a cellphone of my own, but the fact that I now acknowledge that I probably will end up with one (whereas one year ago, I had vowed to live a cell-free life until, untethered by even the wispiest of wireless connections, I crawled into my grave), and the fact that my teenage daughter is now making a very persuasive case that, given the ever-growing scarcity of functioning pay phones, she needs one, says something.

The cellphone has given us a variety of archetypal urban situations. We've all experienced the person on the subway or in the quiet restaurant, jabbering with wild abandon into his cellphone to settle some bit of office complication or arrange his next assignation. The sound of the cellphone ringer playing the tuneless MIDI rendition of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto Number 5 or "In the Hall of the Mountain King" that the cellphone owner downloaded and installed on the phone to express her "personality." The disconcerting experience of walking down the street next to a stranger who appears to be talking to himself, only to realize that he's in fact having a long-distance conversation via one of those cleverly hidden headsets.

And there's more. For example: Has anyone but me noticed the "cellphone stance"? (Apparently, someone has.) At a crowded street corner, you'll sometimes see a man in a business suit, standing still, oriented in no particular direction, but head bent slightly forward, shoulders hunched in. He is apparently staring down, with the unselfconscious absorption of a Talmudic scholar, at something in his hands. You pass him and you realize he's dialing a cellphone, or scrolling through a cellphone menu, or maybe just trying to figure out how the damned thing works. Keep an eye out for this if you haven't seen it already.

So why am I blathering on about this? Actually, because of something that happened yesterday as I bustled into the train station on my way to work. As I came off the first escalator and hurried toward the turnstile and the stairs to the platform, I passed an ordinary young woman in ordinary dress: Blue jeans, a nice T-shirt, sneakers. She stood facing the wall of the corridor, a cellphone to her ear, and was bent slightly forward, completely enveloped in her call. And every once in a while she would let out a sound -- the sound not just of crying, but of pure, unvarnished, inconsolable grief. Along with the rest of the crowd I moved past her quickly, and as I did so I realized that her grief was intensifying; the crying became ever more insistent, ever less admitting of relief, urged on by the cascade of whatever bad news was streaming down from the ether and into her earpiece. By the time I had reached the turnstile, I could hear distantly behind me that her crying had evolved into what can only be described as a howl of anguish.

And we all just kept moving on to our trains.

I will never know what prompted the sorrow that this young woman felt at that moment -- sorrow enough, it's certain, to trump all local circumstance in her mind. But clearly enough, the blowzy, free-talking subway rider, sharing one side of his salacious conversations with a captive audience of passengers, is only part of the picture. Even in a world where electronic communication allows us to share in the horrors of populations of strangers half a world away in Uganda and Sudan, the cellphone, it would appear, offers perhaps the ultimate deprivatization of the most personal grief.