We inspect our exit point — a manhole in the middle of the road. Will Hunt, a bespectacled 26-year-old who is writing a book about the underground (“The last frontier,” he says, “in an over-mapped, Google-Earthed world.”) will serve as our spotter. Will’s job is to watch for traffic: ascending from the hole, we do not wish to be hit by a car. We are to communicate by walkie-talkie. Will ties a long pink ribbon to the inside of the manhole cover. Dangling downward, this will be our signal we have reached the end....Time to hop on the subway again?
Filthy, backpacked, smelling of the sewer, we board a rush-hour subway....
The sewer under Greene Street was only four feet high (Erling is 6 foot 3.) It got smaller and smaller, until they were forced on hands and knees, then eventually on their bellies. Crawling through raw sewage. The ceiling was higher on Canal Street, they report, but the floor was caked with so much feces they sank in it like quicksand. They were turned back by an impassable mountain of waste....
Where should the intrepid explorer go when the world is totally over-mapped and Google-Earthed? Where do you go? And why? A rewrite of my favorite quote:
Why do we require a trip through the sewers in order to be able to perceive one moment of reality? I mean... is the sewer more "real"? I mean, isn't New York "real"? I mean, you see, I think if you could become fully aware of what existed in the cigar store next door to this restaurant, I think it would just blow your brains out! I mean... isn't there just as much "reality" to be perceived in the cigar store as there is in the sewers? I mean, what do you think? You see, I think that not only is there nothing more real about the sewers I think there's nothing that different, in a certain way. I mean, because reality is uniform, in a way. So that if you're — if your perceptions — I mean, if your own mechanism is operating correctly, it would become irrelevant to go into the sewers, and sort of absurd! Because, I mean, it's just — I mean, of course, on some level, I mean, obviously it's very different from a cigar store on Seventh Avenue, but I mean...
But, well, I agree with you... But the problem is that people can't see the cigar store, now. I mean, things don't affect people the way they used to. I mean, it may very well be that ten years from now people will pay ten thousand dollars in cash to be castrated, just in order to be affected by something!
Well, why...why do you think that is? I mean, why is that? I mean, is it just because people are lazy today? Or they're bored? I mean, are we just like bored, spoiled children who've just been lying in the bathtub all day just playing with their plastic duck and now they're just thinking: "Well! what can I do?"
Okay! Yes! We're bored! We're all bored now! But has it ever occurred to you, Wally, that the process that creates this boredom that we see in the world now may very well be a self-perpetuating, unconscious form of brain-washing, created by a world totalitarian government based on money? And that all of this is much more dangerous than one thinks? And it's not just a question of individual survival, Wally, but that somebody who's bored is asleep, and somebody who's asleep will not say "no"? See, I keep meeting these people, I mean, uh, just a few days ago I met this man whom I greatly admire...? And he told me that he no longer watches television, he doesn't read newspapers and he doesn't read magazines. He's completely cut them out of his life, because he really does feel that we're living in some kind of Orwellian nightmare now, and that everything that you hear now contributes to turning you into a robot!
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