Took the N train home from work yesterday.  I usually drive, but when gas went over four dollars a gallon (I chose to write that out because the number is too staggering) I decided to mix things up a bit with my commute and lighten the load a bit.  Like watering down scotch.

Took advantage of the train ride to read a good portion of Colin McGinn’s intellectual memoir The Making of a Philosopher.  This is not bragging.  I brag later in the entry.  Really, I only mention the book because it has a lot to do with what actually transpired on that train ride I mentioned before these eddies of exposition.

Was standing on the N train towards the middle poles, a few feet from the door but not too close since I got on at 34th Street and was headed to Astoria and got pushed toward the middle (as so many independent minded folk eventually join a mainstream).  Somewhere in Manhattan, I’m betting, a guy got on the train and stood next to me – and even though many guys and many girls have stood next to me on the train, without actually seeing this gentleman’s face, I thought I knew him – it was only his frame and his head, but I swore he was familiar.

When we got out from underground I was still entrenched in my philosophy when the gentleman next to me started with the Blackberry.  Even that wouldn’t have caught my attention as being so outlandish if, when the train made its next stop at 39th Avenue, the man hadn’t been so busy caressing the device that he couldn’t spare a hand to hold onto the rail before the train stopped a smidge abruptly and sent the man hurtling softly into my bony side.  Undeterred, my eyes didn’t leave the book.  I remained undeterred when at 36th Avenue, the same exact thing happened, only the impact was more forceful – not enough to disturb my focus, but enough for the man to say “Jesus Christ,” as a form of apology that, while not explicitly offered, I accepted in my own tacitly inexplicit way.

I glanced over again and saw the man in profile, now convinced I know who he is.  And what he’s doing on that train.  And where he’s going, if he’s the man I think he is.

Broadway.  We both detrain.  He heads back down 31st Street, I across Broadway to my own block.

Ladies and Gentleman, WFAN’s Chris Carlin.

I think.

See, WFAN has its studio just down the block from my apartment.  Totally reasonable that Mr. Carlin would be heading over there on the N.

The point of this post is first of all not to scare Chris Carlin or even to namedrop, yet still not to hammer home that I read philosophical memoirs on subway trains in mid-spring.  It’s merely to highlight the connection I saw between what I was reading and what I soon saw.  In the memoir, McGinn wrote of both his focus and his luck – of his proactivity, and of the worldly circumstances that accepted, encouraged and accelerated his achievements.  You might say it’s like howling at the moon and the moon howling back.  Only when you think about it a little, it’s not the moon that you’re hearing at all, but an echo of your own voice in the forbidding canyon below.

The world we see is in our head.  If we’re lucky, and faithful, the creation we see does correlate to an external world.  But as a tree is contained in a seed, truly our whole lives our held in our minds.  What if the things that happen to us, that surprise us, delight us, are really surprises we withhold from ourselves – since they’re in our minds before we can acknowledge them?  What then?

For now, for me, I love the irony of the situation – I listen to Carlin on the radio in the morning on my drives to work, yet I see him in person during one of my very few subway commutes.  It’s cool to have had him run into me.  It’s also cool that I’ve gotten a post out of something so small, yet has made me think so much.