An Attempt at Exhausting Court Square

“The Friendly City” is a weekly column about walking in Harrisonburg that will run during 2024. Each week, your friendly correspondent, writer and teacher Sofia Samatar, will reflect on a walk in our city.

Usually, I walk around the city; this week, I decided to let the city walk around me.

A few weeks ago, in Parentheses Books, I picked up a little volume called An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, by the experimental writer Georges Perec (famous for having written a novel without using the letter E). In October 1974, Perec spent three days in the Place Saint-Sulpice, writing down everything he observed. He wasn’t interested in the landmarks—the district council building, the church, the cafés—but what he called “the rest”: “that which is generally not taken note of, that which is not noticed, that which has no importance: what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds.”

Here’s an example of Perec’s writing in the book:

It is 6:45 p.m.

Autos go by

A yellow postal van stops in front of the mailbox, which a postal worker relieves of its dual contents (Paris/Out of Town, including suburbs)

It’s still raining

I’m drinking a Salers Gentian.

I was captivated by this project. Is it possible to exhaust a place? I didn’t have three days to spend on the experiment, but I thought I could manage one. I decided to sit at Broad Porch Coffee across from the courthouse during the café’s opening hours, from seven in the morning until six in the evening, and attempt to exhaust this place.

***

7:05 a.m. Four men in baseball caps and sneakers come into the café, then a man alone with his laptop. A school bus passes.

The lights are on in the beautiful courthouse. Seated at a table outside, close to the sidewalk, I can see into the offices. Picture frames hang crowded together on the walls. Halloween mobiles dangle paper spiders and pumpkins. Out front, a banner with a picture of a sugar skull announces the Skeleton Festival.

A man with a businesslike air, wearing a checkered shirt and flowered bowtie, enters the café.

Across the street, on the steps of the district court, a woman with a smooth white bob smokes contemplatively, resting her arm on the wall, watching the brightening sky.

A pink edge of cloud shows beyond the high stone balcony of the courthouse. Does anyone ever stand up there?

The square is quiet, as if half asleep. Subdued stained glass of the Presbyterian church: a marine palette of green, lavender, and gray.

The businesslike man in the bowtie leaves the café. A drowsy-looking woman follows, raising a tattooed arm, eating banana bread from a box.

An officer in a brown uniform crosses the street, carrying a heavy-looking black bag, and enters the door of the courthouse marked Exit Only.

The man in the bowtie returns, looking at his watch. He must have been strolling around the courthouse. He tries the door of the district court, but it’s locked. He waits on the step, reading the signs on the wall.

A balding, vaping man in shades goes by, wearing bright blue sweatpants and walking a tiny dog.

A woman carrying two bags goes up the steps of the district court, passing the man in the bowtie, and a guard lets her in. Bowtie, looking a bit crestfallen, walks down the steps to wait on the sidewalk.

The bell on the courthouse clock tower tolls eight o’clock.

The square is waking up. A noisy, beeping truck stops outside the restaurant next door, its hazard lights blinking. In front it says Thermo King; on the side, Schenk Foods – Since 1928.

Bowtie has finally entered the court!

A silver-haired man in a black shirt stands on the sidewalk near my table, looking around, waiting for someone.

The driver of the truck enters the café, pushing a huge dolly loaded with crates of milk.

The silver man’s friend arrives: a man with salt-and-pepper hair in a sage-green polo shirt. “Good to see you!” “It’s been a while!” “It has!” “You’ve been around the world!”

A man in a cap and work boots, a camouflage-pattern phone case at his belt, goes by with a sign to set up at the corner: Road Work Ahead.

Three prisoners cross from the district court building to the courthouse, cuffed together, escorted by officers. Two wear orange jumpsuits; one is in red and white stripes. They shuffle along in their ill-fitting slippers and ankle chains, taking the steps one at a time, and go through the Exit Only door.

People go in and out of the café. Young people who look like students arrive with wet hair.  A bald man leaves his lovely, sensitive, chocolate-brown dog tied to the railing while he buys his coffee; it gazes after him with whiskey-colored eyes.

Bowtie is back. He wanders past the café, looking around in a concerned way, almost turning in circles, as if watching for someone who might appear from any direction.

A parking attendant in a green vest, sunglasses strapped around his bald head, ambles down the sidewalk, checking the cars.

A man with a backpack sits on the steps of the district court, apparently waiting for someone, vaping and drinking from a can.

There are many backpacks in the city. Also a lot of baldness.

The sun slips past the courthouse, lighting the street, the lawn, and the edge of the pale stone church.

A young woman stands in the light on the corner, fluffing up her hair and taking selfies. When she gets into her car, another car stops beside her; the driver wants her parking space, but she tells him no, sorry, she’s not leaving, and directs him down the street.

She sits in her car, which is badly dented on one side, and puts on her glasses.

What is the happiness of writing all this down?

Leafy trees. A young woman with a massive neuroscience textbook. A whitish-blue sky, the horizon almost too bright to look at.

Inmates in jumpsuits, more officers with heavy bags (could it be their lunch?), four people with camera equipment talking on the courthouse lawn. Bowtie lingers nearby, looking at some papers, checking his phone. He sits down on the courthouse steps.

A man in a brown suit, light blue shirt, and pink tie, with a leather satchel over his shoulder, walks slowly from his car to the district court. He goes up the steps gingerly, gripping the railing. Contrast his arduous progress with the energy of the selfie-taking woman, who springs from her car, smiles at the photographers on the lawn, and asks their permission to pass. They wave her on politely.

One thing about the relationship between life and writing: life has more. It takes very little life to fill up a page of a notebook.

Bowtie reappears, talking animatedly to a woman dressed all in black. They walk toward the courthouse together.

A woman in flipflops with neatly curled bangs leaves the district court, carrying some papers. She squints at the sun through her glasses and drives away in her old maroon car.

A man with twins in a double stroller enters the café. A woman on clacking high heels in a surgical mask. A woman in orange clogs, discreet little tattooed flowers showing on her wrist against the cuff of her trench coat.

This square, where almost nothing is happening, is so interesting I can’t look away! The woman all in black, who walked off with Bowtie, has reappeared on the corner, talking into her phone, which she holds some distance from her face. Bowtie paces in the background.

A man leaves the district court at a run, dashes to his parked car, flings his backpack inside it, and runs back into the court.

Selfie reappears, wearing her glasses and carrying a bag. Taking long strides in her striped pants, she enters the district court.

On the corner, All Black texts, then makes another call, while Bowtie waits. Somebody is missing from their party. All Black gestures emphatically as she speaks—pointing, waving, circling her hand—but she’s smiling, as if she can see the humor in the situation.

The sun has reached me. Cobwebs glisten where the railing of the café meets the wall. I blow a small insect from my hand.

The café is full. A lively atmosphere. For some time, I have not heard the courthouse bells. Fragments of conversation on the breeze. “There’s so much beauty there, even when it’s raining.” “He doesn’t have characteristics. He is characteristics.”

I look up from writing, and Bowtie and All Black have disappeared. Good luck to them!

Perec: Obvious limits to such an undertaking: even when my goal is just to observe, I don’t see what takes place a few meters from me: I don’t notice, for example, that cars are parking.

***

Obvious limits to such an undertaking. Now, compiling my notes, I realize I’ve written a small book, maybe as long as the one Perec wrote in three days, certainly too long to include it all here. They go on for pages, the people of the square, the men in neon vests examining the road with an orange level, the woman in the pearl necklace who hangs her jacket neatly in the back of her car, the biker with turquoise-streaked hair, the slouching man reading a book at one of the café tables without ordering anything, the child in the purple dress dotted with white hearts, the woman with dyed red hair carrying a life-size ceramic duck. Selfie runs wildly across the road, drops her phone, retrieves it, dives into her car, and emerges wearing a different jacket. Clouds cover the sun. So many people I know appear—coworkers, students, a woman I met once before while waiting for a train. I see Bowtie and All Black again, standing on the courthouse lawn with another woman and a child who bounces around while the adults talk, windmilling his arms and improvising karate moves, the long sleeves of his hoodie flapping. But I’ll have to leave them out—all the children, the dogs, the changing sky, the different notebooks and binders, the tattoos, the phones, the keys. I will not be able to exhaust, in writing, even half a day in this place, or begin to describe the feeling that autumn is near.


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