In the prose poem "Crowds," Charles Baudelaire wrote:
It is not given to every man to take a bath of multitude; enjoying a crowd is an art; and only he can relish a debauch of vitality at the expense of the human species, on whom, in his cradle, a fairy has bestowed the love of masks and masquerading, the hate of home, and the passion for roaming… Multitude, solitude: identical terms.
Stefany Anne Golberg finds a parallel in city life today:
Like Baudelaire, we are perpetually immersed in the crowd.
In lieu of privacy in private, we have created a public privacy. Picture a bus in a contemporary American metropolis during a morning commute. We are all listening to music on our personal listening devices. Some of us also read email on a smartphone. … We are in a social space, absorbed in the digital crowd, but trying to be alone inside of it. When we go home at night, we are still in the crowd. We hop on our computers, consume information. We might go onto Facebook and talk to hundreds of friends at once, retool our image: What do I want to tell people that I like today? How do I want to look today? How can I expand the breadth of my crowd? The more people I am friends with, the more people I can see.
Like Baudelaire, we are watching, observing, hoping to find ourselves in the multitude.
(Photo by Zach Klein)
The Dish 