The Look on the bus

In Flekke, the tiny little place I lived in for two years, people complained. There was no privacy, people talked about you, there was gossip, etc, etc. With all the due truth in that, there is no way to compare it to this.

Imagine a medium sized town. Around 90 000 people. Has a big University and is well known for its cultural life (which I have been searching for, but fail to find most of the times).
In a normal place, you would think: cosmopolitan, anomimous, diverse.

Forget it. It is Portugal we are talking about.
And in Portugal... there is the look.

The Look

The act of staring at someone, evaluating their physical appearance in an obvious and unpleasant manner. It is not meant to be discreet or curious, it is meant to be what could be considered in other parts of the earth, rude. It tries to vex you, to separate you as if you were a threat (becuase you kind of are). Moreover it reveals intuitively a sort of intellectual work inside the looker that is obviously trying to classify and explain you as if you were a strange species of animal.

Welcome to, what a wise man once called, "the culture of the look".

When you sit on a bus, open a book and whenever you look up you see the same people staring at you, it starts being creepy. Everyone notices it, but if you ask about it, they will just say is normal society and adult-like behaviour.

Sartre used to talk about "the look" as a way to try to capture the other's freedom, to transform them in a "en-soi" rather than a "pour-soi" like our selves. It is as if, in the consumer's society, we need our social environment to be a super-market shelve and everyone a product, with some very understandable big letters labelling it. Otherwise, you will just have to stare to see if you understand it and can avoid asking for help to the shop assistant.

I don't want to be understood.