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Absicht makes the heart
A guy in an aggressively shiny waxed car reefed in front of me all of a sudden, as I was travelling by bike towards a red traffic light. There was nowhere to go but brake. He wound his window down. “Das war Absicht,” he advised: that was deliberate. I wasn’t sure whether that meant “that was intentional” or “that was unintentional” and had to ask the person cycling alongside of me. I agree that we all need to obey the same road rules and that tragically often, you only get one chance to get it wrong. I don’t agree that endangering people is a useful way to teach them that lesson. We travelled on, in a wheeling pack now. Fat people, thin people, everybody bikes. I stayed in the lane. Ahead at the next lights a compact, muscular guy dinking his girlfriend stopped to strip off his hoodie and slung it in the basket behind him. She turned and smiled at him. On the pedestrian path a child passed slowly in a tiny low wagon, drawn by its father, on foot. This child was so cherubic and had such golden curls I had to work out if it was a real child or some large waxen doll. But he or she was smiling upwards, twirling his fingers at the tiny ribbed umbrella protecting him from the high clouds, so evidently sunk in a deeply contemplative world of his own that the rest of us were so much intrusion and noise. That slow, blinking smile. That poet’s mind.
