I was very moved, once, by an exhibition of Sebastio Salgado photographs entitled Migrants. That means people moving, but to Salgado it also means people moving overland, long distances, with poor accomodations, and generally against their will. It's made up mostly of large black and white prints. Walking in to the exhibit was off-putting at first: Why do we need to see this? This stuff goes in the newspaper—I don't want to chase down bad news on a weekend. But the photos themselves were compelling. By the time I walked out, I had a strong, clear sense that most people on the planet have only what they wear on their backs, and an incredible number of them are at any time moving overland, long distances, with poor accomodations, and generally against their will.

I had plenty of time to meditate on this as I was walking across Edinburgh today with two large backpacks on my back, migrating my stuff (more than I could carry on my back) from one flat to another. I've got it good: I have a warm, dry place to go at the end of the day. But hauling my stuff around like this gives me a feeling of solidarity, a sense that the human condition is rough and lonely: that it is, essentially, just spells of calm punctuated by frequent upheavals involving discomfort, toil, and a pit of lonely wonder. With all this slogging around, do we end up, on average, above zero in our general happiness? Or are we constantly in debt, always placeless, always owing something to the world that housed us for a little while, yet never fully settling in there, never living easily. I suspect the answer to this question is the same for us in posh Anglo-America as it is for Salgado's forced migrants, those people crossing a border from Bosnia in a big wagon with 20 relatives (and perhaps some enemies).

The strange fact which comes to me each time I see photos like this, or read stories of people hard-up in the third world, doing more on the daily to live a tough life than I do to live my posh one, is the same strange fact that one sees in studying the animal kingdom: life keeps going. It never asks, is this life above zero or below it? It never makes such an economic calculation. Life, simply, keeps going. Any doubt, any dour calculation to that effect which I might make, that is just posh Anglo-American fantasy.