The Old Marketplace
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Who in the world prefers to go home through the crowded, noisy, bustling and jostling, fishy and filthy, labyrinthine, and sometimes muddy old marketplace, although he can take a clean and quiet, straight and well-paved road? I do. Almost every day, having finished my work, I find myself pushing through or being pushed by the crowds in the market which lies between my office and my bus-stop. I know, of course, that I can save time and energy if I choose the other way, but I am ready to sacrifice both of them and even willing to suffer all the inconveniences for the pleasure and wisdom the market provides me with.
I am glad that I happen to have this old-fashioned, traditional style of market nearby, and have easy access to it. But I am unhappy to know that this kind of market is rapidly losing its former necessity and attractions day by day. Already these crude sorts of marketplaces everywhere throughout the country have already given way to newly-constructed, well-arranged modern buildings or to huge department-stores and spick-and-span supermarkets. Nowadays people even prefer to use the word "market" only without the additional word "place", but remember it was just a place, a piece of open ground, originally. In the beginning there were just suitable places for people to gather first, and towns and cities grew around them, not the other way round. It is not strange therefore that many of the modern cities and towns, big and small, still retain trace of this phenomenon, usually in the heart of them, as the street names and landmarks. "Market Street" in Philadelphia is the one, for example.
Whenever I enter the marketplace, I feel something primitive, something mythic permeating the place. I feel like a primitive man of the stone age bringing his fowls to the place for the first time in his life, and wondering at the novelties around him. I feel that the fundamental pattern of our living has not changed much since then, nor will it change much a thousand years hereafter, whenever I mingle with the crowds in it. I can live the time of "Persian Market" in the music of A. W. Ketelbey here and today, and have the momentary illusion of me going through the bustling crowds in the back streets of Hongkong or Istanbul at the same time. A marketplace seems to transcend time and space.
You name it and I will find it out for you in my market, anything. I promise. But don't expect me to get you a "real" mink coat or a "real" diamond necklace. A market is not a place for showing off. In my market life reduces its scale to the simple form of living. Life, you know, comprises always something not essential to living, and you can be free from being absorbed in unnatural musings and unnecessary pretensions of life in the market. People in it, whether they are sellers or buyers, or just onlookers like you and me, are human beings placed in the most natural context of human existence. You will come across hypocrisy everywhere in the world, but not in the market. It is the only place in the word where hypocrisy cannot find a foothold.
You are grossly mistaken if you imagine, from the simple fact that people in the market speak one octave higher than the people you meet in a concert or in an art galley, that all the soft aspects of human civilization have disappeared from it. Quite the reverse is true. Of course people often, nay, always haggle and niggle over a cent, and this haggling and niggling often develops into a quarrel which threatens to turn into an imminent murder, and draws a throng of spectators including me instantly, but fortunately or unfortunately I have never seen or heard that a quarrel in the marketplace has ever resulted in a murder. Murder needs a more clandestine place, I think.
A market is much softer and more humane place than you think it to be. In it no one gets angry when you push him on the back with your elbow, and it is the only place in the world you can safely land on another person's foot without being much embarrassed. People become suddenly gentle and generous, and no one expects superfluous ceremonies and apologies from others in the market. People are just too busy to do that.
Among many kinds of fun you can have in it, you cannot leave out pushing and being pushed. Pushing another person with your elbow is a fun, and being pushed by others is a fun too. You don't have to try desperately to burrow through the crowds in order to get to your destination in the marketplace. You will be conveyed to the place in spite of yourself by being pushed. Pushing another person in the marketplace cannot be, therefore, unlike on the walking street, a heinous crime. I don't know much about Communism or Communist ideology, but I know they don't allow the kind of market in which I can have the fun of pushing and being pushed. That's bad. What a tragedy!
A market has the miraculous power of transforming people of infinite variety into a simple and equal stream of humanity. Once you enter it and mingle with the crowds, you become nobody and everybody at the same time. Immaculately-dressed nuns in it can no more be the object of particular public attention than miserably-clothed beggars soliciting your charity. Only in the market, where people are exposed to the basic essentials of living, do people become psychologically equal, and this psychological equality comes before rational, legal, or political equality. We are not equal before the law; we are equal only in the marketplace and when we buy something to eat or something to wear.
I have been watching an old woman who sells something at a corner ever since I began to pass through this marketplace. I presume she is far over seventy from her snowy white hair. She is always sitting on the ground behind her meager commodities which vary according to the change of seasons. Like many other sellers in the market, she doesn't have her own shop. She has only her place. Several times I have bought vegetables or something from her on my way home, although I did not have to buy them myself.
I was at first struck by her white hair, and naturally I felt pity for her, especially on hot summer days or on freezing cold days. But later I was more deeply struck by her constant cheerfulness and the unusual vitality she had for her age and for the hardship she must find herself in. Soon I realized that she has become a living lesson for me. She rarely has left her place, even when there were apparently no customers. Whenever she sold something, a cabbage, a bunch of radishes, or one or two frozen fish, she never failed to draw out all the money she had already made from under her apron, added the new money to it, and counted it all over again once more, and with great satisfaction and contentment put it back to her pocket under her apron. I am not Wordsworth, the great English poet in the 19th century, and I don't have his poor, old "leech gatherer on the lonely moor," who taught him wisdom of life. But fortunately, I do have that old woman at the corner of my marketplace all the time, before whom all my sentimental pretensions to life and weariness of the day melt and vanish like the spring snow before the sun, and I am always restored to the simple courage of living, on my way home.
(May 21, 1983)
I am glad that I happen to have this old-fashioned, traditional style of market nearby, and have easy access to it. But I am unhappy to know that this kind of market is rapidly losing its former necessity and attractions day by day. Already these crude sorts of marketplaces everywhere throughout the country have already given way to newly-constructed, well-arranged modern buildings or to huge department-stores and spick-and-span supermarkets. Nowadays people even prefer to use the word "market" only without the additional word "place", but remember it was just a place, a piece of open ground, originally. In the beginning there were just suitable places for people to gather first, and towns and cities grew around them, not the other way round. It is not strange therefore that many of the modern cities and towns, big and small, still retain trace of this phenomenon, usually in the heart of them, as the street names and landmarks. "Market Street" in Philadelphia is the one, for example.
Whenever I enter the marketplace, I feel something primitive, something mythic permeating the place. I feel like a primitive man of the stone age bringing his fowls to the place for the first time in his life, and wondering at the novelties around him. I feel that the fundamental pattern of our living has not changed much since then, nor will it change much a thousand years hereafter, whenever I mingle with the crowds in it. I can live the time of "Persian Market" in the music of A. W. Ketelbey here and today, and have the momentary illusion of me going through the bustling crowds in the back streets of Hongkong or Istanbul at the same time. A marketplace seems to transcend time and space.
You name it and I will find it out for you in my market, anything. I promise. But don't expect me to get you a "real" mink coat or a "real" diamond necklace. A market is not a place for showing off. In my market life reduces its scale to the simple form of living. Life, you know, comprises always something not essential to living, and you can be free from being absorbed in unnatural musings and unnecessary pretensions of life in the market. People in it, whether they are sellers or buyers, or just onlookers like you and me, are human beings placed in the most natural context of human existence. You will come across hypocrisy everywhere in the world, but not in the market. It is the only place in the word where hypocrisy cannot find a foothold.
You are grossly mistaken if you imagine, from the simple fact that people in the market speak one octave higher than the people you meet in a concert or in an art galley, that all the soft aspects of human civilization have disappeared from it. Quite the reverse is true. Of course people often, nay, always haggle and niggle over a cent, and this haggling and niggling often develops into a quarrel which threatens to turn into an imminent murder, and draws a throng of spectators including me instantly, but fortunately or unfortunately I have never seen or heard that a quarrel in the marketplace has ever resulted in a murder. Murder needs a more clandestine place, I think.
A market is much softer and more humane place than you think it to be. In it no one gets angry when you push him on the back with your elbow, and it is the only place in the world you can safely land on another person's foot without being much embarrassed. People become suddenly gentle and generous, and no one expects superfluous ceremonies and apologies from others in the market. People are just too busy to do that.
Among many kinds of fun you can have in it, you cannot leave out pushing and being pushed. Pushing another person with your elbow is a fun, and being pushed by others is a fun too. You don't have to try desperately to burrow through the crowds in order to get to your destination in the marketplace. You will be conveyed to the place in spite of yourself by being pushed. Pushing another person in the marketplace cannot be, therefore, unlike on the walking street, a heinous crime. I don't know much about Communism or Communist ideology, but I know they don't allow the kind of market in which I can have the fun of pushing and being pushed. That's bad. What a tragedy!
A market has the miraculous power of transforming people of infinite variety into a simple and equal stream of humanity. Once you enter it and mingle with the crowds, you become nobody and everybody at the same time. Immaculately-dressed nuns in it can no more be the object of particular public attention than miserably-clothed beggars soliciting your charity. Only in the market, where people are exposed to the basic essentials of living, do people become psychologically equal, and this psychological equality comes before rational, legal, or political equality. We are not equal before the law; we are equal only in the marketplace and when we buy something to eat or something to wear.
I have been watching an old woman who sells something at a corner ever since I began to pass through this marketplace. I presume she is far over seventy from her snowy white hair. She is always sitting on the ground behind her meager commodities which vary according to the change of seasons. Like many other sellers in the market, she doesn't have her own shop. She has only her place. Several times I have bought vegetables or something from her on my way home, although I did not have to buy them myself.
I was at first struck by her white hair, and naturally I felt pity for her, especially on hot summer days or on freezing cold days. But later I was more deeply struck by her constant cheerfulness and the unusual vitality she had for her age and for the hardship she must find herself in. Soon I realized that she has become a living lesson for me. She rarely has left her place, even when there were apparently no customers. Whenever she sold something, a cabbage, a bunch of radishes, or one or two frozen fish, she never failed to draw out all the money she had already made from under her apron, added the new money to it, and counted it all over again once more, and with great satisfaction and contentment put it back to her pocket under her apron. I am not Wordsworth, the great English poet in the 19th century, and I don't have his poor, old "leech gatherer on the lonely moor," who taught him wisdom of life. But fortunately, I do have that old woman at the corner of my marketplace all the time, before whom all my sentimental pretensions to life and weariness of the day melt and vanish like the spring snow before the sun, and I am always restored to the simple courage of living, on my way home.
(May 21, 1983)
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