Christian Catafago

We are Monday September 15th 2008 in London and the world is coming to an end:

I’ve just tried to enter the offices of one of the subsidiaries of Lehman Brothers.

I was lucky to get back to my childhood friend’s house in a posh neighborhood after this ordeal; would the world’s economy collapse or only the banking system? In the subway, I started looking at fellow passengers for signs to interpret. Faces were serious: I was in a sequel of “Many are called” (1938) taken in the NYC subway in the 30’s by Walker Evans as the world was in the aftermath of the 1929 crisis. Over the next few days, I would go back to the “circle line” of the London Tube; 70 years after “Many are called”, I saw this this circular line as a metaphor of our times; while as a child and young adult I thought time would see progress, suddenly all seemed like a universal version of the myth of Sisyphus. Always getting that same stone over the mountaintop again…over and over. Were we all punished for humanity’s Hubris? Or was it because humanity had been pushing away Thanatos for so long? I looked for answers on the faces of my fellow human beings on the tube’s circle line.