I take the T to work every day, and for as many gigs as possible. Basically, I hate driving (and parking) in the city, and when there’s a highly functional subway and bus system, it makes no sense to drive if I don’t have to. But more than that, riding the T and walking is a uniquely uplifting experience for me.

Many people, okay, most people I talk to about the fact that I commute using public transit say one of two things: “Oh, I could never do that, I hate the subway,” and, “Good for you,” as if I’m volunteering at a meth clinic. Which is ironic, because when I explain that I am singularly not fond of driving to commute, I’m usually met with unanimous consent on the point. But it seems that the misery of driving outweighs the perceived misery of the T.

Which mystifies me. But that’s another topic, really.

The subway is a curious purgatory, a place that exists in an eternal between. As a public system, it lacks a lot of the nuanced hierarchy of the highway, where beater cars yield to, or sometimes boldly challenge, the aggressively new WASP-mobiles of the debt-ridden, self-proclaimed elite. Once aboard a trolley or train, there is no use for either the hasty, impatient sidewalk stalk to which I am prone or the oblivious dawdle that always congests the Harvard Square byways. Instead, there are minutes at a time devoted to a void, a blank—waiting from one goal to another goal. In such goal-oriented times, this is a precious pause.

While arrested so, people change. More so than with air travel, which has its own rituals and regulations that stymie the process, the routine of the daily mass-transit commute has a distilling, purifying effect. Perhaps it’s the anomie that many people feel for the ordeal, perhaps it’s the early morning and after-work fog that settles, but people are somehow condensed into themselves on the T, and something remarkable shines through.

The mark of a truly great portrait photographer is the ability to capture the unique essence of a person, to find at least one aspect of who they truly are. With a camera, as in life, piercing the veils we live behind is an awesome responsibility. It’s small wonder that people have believed that the camera will steal their soul, since even among the cognoscenti, those rare, intimate portraits are both treasured and viewed with a slight bit of discomfort, as if we had entered a sacred space without an invitation. That invitation is trust, and it opens us all up to a level of humanity we typically daren’t recognize.

It is ironic, then, that while enduring a loud, often awkwardly cramped purgatory, that same humanity glimmers. As I look around at everyone else, it’s plain to see that they are, at that moment, just who they are. For those brief, timeless breaths, everyone around me has dropped their guard for whatever reason, and we are all invited in.

The opportunity to recognize something magical in a complete stranger has probably never carried much cultural weight. The rules of society are governed by our masks, by how we present ourselves and how we respond to the masks of our peers. That beater car on the highway is a rust-and-rubber mask for the driver, and the impatient march down the cobbled walks of “our fair city” another. We live by these veils, and too often we love by them as well. But when the masks dissolve, we realize what it is to love, and what it is to live.

To be fair, I don’t love the subway, any more than the next cubical drone. I do love the gift of passing through purgatory twice a day, watching the still at work, and emerging a touch closer to paradise.

• BROWSE / IN TIMELINE
• « Loving Hypocracy
• » Thinking Magical Thinking

• BROWSE / IN Assorted
• « Synchronicity