on people-watching and stillness (aragon)

For years on end, this couple has sat within its molehill watching skirt hems and trouser legs shinning up the ladder of assignations. For years they have sat bound in the straitjacket of this absurd place on the edge of the arcades, two elderly souls who can be seen frittering away their lives, he smoking and she sewing, sewing, indefatigably sewing as if the fate of the universe hung from her fabric. God knows with what strange blooms their paired skulls are decorated, for in the lingering hours and in the darkness, the darkness which saves them the exorbitant cost of an electric lamp, lovely natural growths must, at their unrestricted leisure, pile up behind this united front of foreheads. So accustomed to one another that their daily chatter has at last thinned into silence, the two must now accompany the mechanical gesture of the pipe and the needle with such magnificent arabesques of the imagination as are generally expected only from poets. Seeing the footsteps of mystery and harlotry criss-cross outside their windowpane, what thoughts do they exhume from the bottom of their minds, these sitters bitten by advancing age and idleness of heart?

- 14, "The Passage de L'Opera," Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon