In many cities, but especially in Prague, individuals seem to blend into the scenery as much as the buildings, benches, or bus stops. Complete strangers push up against each other, share the same handrails, and stare blankly past one another in the metro, disinterested and silent. Masses of people carrying suitcases or grocery bags shuffle along the street, meeting each others’ eyes only out of convenience and stopping only to wait at the ticking, metered crosswalks. Bodies gesture toward street signs, stoop down toward the ground to discipline children, flip open newspapers, and adjust scarves and ties without noticing others around them.
There is a distinctive sense of anonymity felt in the city, and this disconnect has become a familiar and almost strangely comforting facet of life in Prague. Traveling through the city can feel like walking around as a body, idly following the flow of things instead of a person filled with active thoughts, questions, and feelings. Although everyone absently files in next to each other to get to a desired location, some unspoken connection still exists through the medium of the city itself. For a month I had been feeling this sense of detached, quiet physicality while walking around in cities of Europe, and last week I think I finally found the name for it.
Ironically enough, it took a non-native English speaker to come up with this word I have been searching for since arriving in Prague. During a lecture one afternoon, after struggling for a few prolonged moments to find the right word in English, my Central European Literature and Society professor sort of smiled and threw his hands in the air as he finally exclaimed, “body-ness!” He may have been searching for another word—perhaps physicality or presence—but “body-ness” somehow sounded much more exact. The lecture that particular day was focused on a reading called The Poetic Image by Czech novelist Zbyněk Havlíček, but one key concept—this sense of “body-ness”—stayed with me. The “body-ness” Havlíček is referring to in his work is the physicality of each individual’s body structured by the subjectivity of the world. In other words, we experience and interpret a constantly changing, vibrant, sensory world through our individual and subjective minds, as well as our bodies. This may sound like a basic fact of life, but as a foreigner living in a completely new and unfamiliar city, this fact constantly resurfaces as I experience each day through the mind and body of an outsider.
Perhaps I am more sensitive to this detached “body-ness” as a foreigner, and even more so as an American, anxiously searching for recognition, comfort, and familiarity in a new place. I listen intently to the announcements on the metro to see if I can pick up any words, perk my ears up at a conversation between two Czech girls behind me about plans for a Saturday night, and scour the streets for signs containing words I know—kava for coffee, stanice for metro station. At times, however, the effort to understand my surroundings makes me feel more present in mind and body than the people surrounding me, ultimately reaffirming my status as an outsider.
I thought this strange detachment might be characteristic only of Prague, but after visiting cities like Vienna and Budapest, it has become clear to me that this distinctly disconnected sense of “body-ness” is part of the city experience as a foreigner, not just the Prague experience. Anyone who has ever lived in a city knows very well that it takes a certain amount of conscious detachment to get through the day—whether it is weaving through various metro stations and all their crowded masses or passing a homeless man without trying to swallow that sickening sense of guilt as you pretend not to hear his begging. In Prague, this is no different. Add on a language barrier, and the detachment becomes even stronger.
In his book Immortality, another Czech author Milan Kundera describes one woman’s physicality—her “body-ness”—by writing, “It was the charm of a gesture drowning in the charmlessness of the body.” In Prague, I experience the beauty, energy, and newness of the city each day as a foreigner, feeling oddly comforted by the charmlessness of the bodies shuffling past me on the street.
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