Despite overcrowded roads, rising fuel prices, polluting carbon emissions and horrific accident statistics, our love affair with the automobile still continues. For many of us the car we drive reflects what we wish to say about ourselves. Just as with the cut of our clothes and the size of our house, our choice of car can reflect the image we want to portray to the world.
Psychologists say this choice can betray a great deal about our politics and personality, about our insecurity, about our seeming need to project ideas of power, success, wealth and virility. Or the lack of those things. Sometimes it seems impossible to do or buy anything without that action or choice showing to the outside world a stance or viewpoint or perceived projection which we feel is maybe simplified, clichéd or just plain wrong.
I must admit I've never been much interested in cars. Nor in clothes or houses for that matter. I'd rather be anonymous, and blend into the background, rather than conciously or unconsciously make a statement. I don't want an expensive look-at-me car, a wardrobe full of fancy shirts, a posh house stuffed with burglar alarms and surrounded by fences and locked gates. I'm more of a second-hand VW Golf, jeans and tee-shirt, Victorian terrace kind of guy. (And this in itself is also making a strong statement about me. You see, we can't get away from it!)
This poem comes from The Green Book Of Poetry, edited by Ivo Mosley.
To a young man driving his own car
So you're already driving your own car
I'll bet your friends are jealous
As you were learning to drive
I thought how splendid for you
To go speeding everywhere
Getting any kind of licence is good.
I often said
Now you speed about in your car
you can't see the roadside trees changing
with the seasons
you can't see the merchants selling fruit
or fish at the roadside
you can't see the woman running along
with a sick child slung on her back
Always on the look-out for traffic-patrols
and red lights
your eyes fixed straight ahead
you speed about
your eyes have grown sharper
your mind has grown busier
and though the price of fuel
may go up even more
and exhaust fumes block your view
you drive around
and do not intend to walk anyway I'm sure
and those years of youth that people spend
walking or running
getting about by bus or subway
you are spending at over 40 mph
When I see you speeding along in your car
I feel you have isolated yourself
too lightly
and my heart grows heavy
KWANG-KYU KIM, Korean, b. 1941, tr. Brother Anthony of Taizé
