The heat and humidity of the day was relenting and a light breeze was blowing a blessed freshness over clammy skin. I had taken a seat in an Adirondack chair by the curb on avenue Mont-Royal where I could watch the passing Flow of humanity and read snatches from the book I was carrying, Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. Every summer from early June to late September the city closes off Mont-Royal to vehicle traffic and turns it into a lively three kilometre long pedestrian mall filled with terraces, open air restaurants, strollers, cyclists, songsters, lovers and loungers of all shapes and sizes. 

  The street is the television I haven’t owned for more than thirty years. I watch and participate in it almost every single day without fail. I find it endlessly entertaining, engaging and heartwarming with its endless array of  smilingly bemused or scowlingly resigned elderly, the proud contented fulfilled or sad thwarted middle-aged, the lovingly tender parents pushing prams or keeping a watchful eye on their little biking bambinos, and the strutting laughing keenly smiling cool or black hearted and clad youth with heavy mascara and a plethora of fantastic hieroglyphic tattoos. 

  “Siddhartha listened…. He had often heard all this before, all these numerous voices in the river, but today they sounded different. He could no longer distinguish the different voices—the merry voice from the weeping voice, the childish voice from the manly voice. They all belonged to each other: the lament of those who yearn, the laughter of the wise, the cry of indignation and the groan of the dying. They were all interwoven and interlocked, entwined in a thousand ways. And all the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together was the world.”—Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

  It is the street and I exalt in its ceaseless Flow!