Living with Strangers

Living with strangers is written by Siri Hustvedt. It is an essay where Siri discusses the different way of living in the country life and in the big city life. She discusses the urban life.

In the beginning of the essay Siri explains how she was living as a child, how it was rude not to say "Hi" at people, and that I would be seen as snobbery. This was the worst thing you could be seen as in her small town. In her apartment she could her everything, people yelling, walking across the room. She describes how wired it was at first when she moved to the big city, minding her own business. Everything was so crowed, and she could smell every single thing from the people next to her in the subways, where she use to come from this kind of intimacy was only normal to lovers and family. She is living so close to strangers, and can see them in their underwear across the street, she has never been so close to anybody. This is why the essay is called living with strangers.

In new York, there is a law, called IT-ISN'T-HAPPENING. You don't say hallo to people you don't know, when you are in the subway you look down, if something wired is happening like the lady in the bathrobe, you just look the other way. These kinds of things, is not your business. In New York City, these things are normal. If you respond to these things you are very brave or just stupid. "It is usually better to treat the unpredictable among us as ghosts, wandering phantoms who playout their lonely narratives for an au-dience that appears to be deaf, dumb and blind." Siri says.

Siri gives a good description of urban living, and as a girl who has lived in both Minnesota and In New York she has a wide opinion on this topic. It seems like she is fine by living in the Big Apple. She has gotten use to the contact you have to your "fellow new Yorker", but she doesn't find the coping technique idyllic. She accounts for two situations where people have used the barrier of silence, and she places both situations in an optimistic light. One of the situations is where a man saves the subway train from a selfish smoker. She accepts that it is difficult to be open to other people all the time, but she needs to break out of the shell sometimes and try to talk to a stranger.

She uses a lot of examples from her own life, she describes her feelings. This is leaving us as a reader very convinced. This method is a classic appeal form and is called pathos.