The Clairvoyant Zoopraxiscope

I witnessed an argument between two subway riders yesterday, something about one woman's complaint that the other woman was muscling her over so that she would occupy two seats instead of one, an unusually long conversation given its subject, one of those conversations in which the momentum that carries it seems to coming from somewhere else entirely, WAY outside the conversation, and it occurred to me that each of us carry around, in our public emergences, our own very particular moral sense which is by definition in flux, so that the smallest change in external or internal conditions might show as a change on the moral scale as well. The catalyst could be a splattering of muddy water by a passing car, a collision with an oblivious drone on the sidewalk, or a sudden noticing of, of all things, the weather, which might either be a good thing or a bad thing. To say that there is no abstract morality is not original but to see it in action was like having my hair combed with one of the doorknobs of perception. And then I got off the train.