The lost soul in the alley

How does one know when someone's soul is wandering loose?

One reason I created this website was to explain to you, the recurring visitor or the casual viewer, how, why, when, and where I took some of the photos you see here.

This is the first of such attempts.

On a trip to Paris – my first time visiting the city – I went for a walk around the Seine River. Yes, the same one that made the headlines around the time of the Olympic Games for not being clean enough to host some competitions.

There was no specific goal in mind. Soak it all in, I guess. I would photograph whomever and whatever looked interesting. Most everything and everyone did. I was in Paris after all. The average Parisian (and even some extravagant tourists) were more fashionable than I was used to seeing, and the architecture was simply beautiful.

On this walk I crossed one of the many bridges that hover the Seine in search of a specific street that played a key role in Julio Cortázar's book Hopscotch – or so I was told. I haven't read the book and don't plan to. Fiction books put me to sleep (I mean no disrespect to fiction book readers or writers).

Once at the street in question, Quai de Conti, the interest in it lasted no more than a few seconds when my eyes were pulled over as if a giant magnet had been turned on.

An older man was walking into a narrowing street, away from the main street. His gray hair put him in the range of 60 to 70 years of age. He walked funny, almost as if he were drunk, leaning side to side. I started to follow him, fearing that was all I would have seen of him. He carried a newspaper in his right hand (although I must confess at first I thought it was a paper bag holding a bottle of liquor), and he didn't walk very fast – slow enough that I could have taken a hundred photos of him if I wanted to. He wasn't going to get away.

He walked right through the middle of the alley. The narrow path itself appeared to narrow more and more, but that could have been an optical illusion caused by the way the light poured in from the top of the adjacent buildings at an angle.

The old man – the lost soul, as I call him – slowed down, looked to the side, paused, and then resumed his slow pace. Perhaps he felt someone following him. He would have been right if he had turned around completely.

It was time to take the photo. It was now or never, as the saying goes.

I took another hundred photos that day, but the photo of the old man stuck with me as if I had forgotten to do something. An unfinished task. His path still picked at me like a thorn on the side of my ribs. Where was he going? Why did he walk the way he did? Why was my sight pulled the way it was?

After giving it some thought and after two years of seeing the image again and again, I think the reason this photo has lingered in my mind is the same reason I'm writing this. I don't know why I was there, nor where he was going, or why he walked the way he did. And I will probably never know. And that's okay. That's the lesson.

I will never know why his soul was wandering alone.

We won't have the answers all the time to anything that happens to us or around us. We can try to go back to the memory – or the photo in this case – to search for answers. We can look at them from different angles and speculate on the answer for days, months, or years on end, never to arrive at an answer.

Sometimes we just have to accept it and carry on. Live with the mystery.

The lost soul in the alley. Paris, 2023.

 But, there’s fun in speculating. Comment below what you think about the lost soul in the image.