The piety now is toward a webbed abstraction of vastness. The uniformly repeating screens of the emporia, with their shoddy articulations and moot committees and mysteriously interesting entrances and pedagogies and cherubic greeters, exude that bored cheer that can only reflect a collective diminishment. Modesty can counter this diminishment. On our civic peninsula, modesty always becomes potently ironic. Beneath the blue vaults of the market, we prefer to seek out little remarked aquatic manifestations in order to notice the emblematic potentials of moving liquid and light.
Most citizens wash cups.
Psychology pours from our objects. Thus, when we are strolling, we wish to abandon salubrious habit to better welcome spontaneous transitions to collective states. For a while at least, we shrug off the theology of extravagance. Small causes can form large results. But for us, rising jets, downward falls, combinations, or an oddly issuing spray happily divert us from the great constant impersonal desires so that we may notice and enjoy the supple nap and receptivity of human thought.