The Curator of Comfortable Distance

There is a man who has been sleeping in the doorway of the pharmacy on Griffenfeldsgade for eleven days now. I know this because I pass him every morning, and I have begun, without quite deciding to, to count.

This is what cities teach you: the arithmetic of the invisible.

He has a sleeping bag the colour of old mustard and a canvas bag that he keeps tucked under his head like a pillow, which suggests either great practicality or great mistrust, or both, which are not so different. He is perhaps sixty. He is perhaps forty-five. Exposure ages a face the way strong light ages a painting — faster than it should, and irreversibly.

The neighbourhood has opinions about him, expressed in the passive voice favoured by people who consider themselves progressive. Something should be done. There are services, apparently. Someone ought to. The conversations happen in the queue at the bakery, between orders for sourdough and cardamom buns, and they have the texture of genuine concern and the weight of a paper bag.

What interests me — professionally, I suppose, since reading the stories objects and spaces tell each other is more or less what I was trained for — is not the man himself, whom I do not know and cannot speak for, but what his presence reveals about the rest of us. How we have developed, collectively, an aesthetic of acknowledgement without engagement. A compassion that is largely curatorial.

We notice. We feel appropriately troubled. We move on. We have, without meaning to, become very skilled at this.

The city helps. Copenhagen has grown fluent in the visual language of concern: the informational placard, the QR code linking to the donation page, the mural celebrating community painted two streets over from where the community in question can no longer afford to live. Culture as gesture. Feeling as exhibit. Everything mounted at the correct height for viewing, labelled, and left.

I am not exempt from this. Let me be precise about that. I have walked past him eleven times. I bought him a coffee on day four, which took perhaps four minutes and which I thought about for considerably longer than four minutes afterward, in the way one thinks about a thing that has cost very little and perhaps should have cost more.

What has changed, in my lifetime, is not that people lack sympathy. The sympathy is real, I think, genuine, it simply has nowhere adequate to go. The systems that should receive it — housing, mental health infrastructure, the entire unglamorous bureaucracy of care — have been so thoroughly underfunded and reorganised and quietly dismantled that individual goodwill pools in the street like rainwater, unable to drain anywhere.

So we curate instead. We share the article. We attend the panel discussion. We buy the tote bag from the organisation doing the actual work, because buying the bag is something, and something is easier to complete than everything.

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes about the society of transparency, the way contemporary culture demands that everything be visible and immediate and felt publicly. What he perhaps underestimates is how visibility can substitute for action — how the act of seeing, and of being seen to see, has become its own form of resolution. We witnessed it. We registered it. The record exists.

On day nine, a woman stopped beside me at the crossing opposite the pharmacy. She looked at the man in the doorway, then at her phone, then back. She took a photograph. Not unkindly — there was nothing predatory in it — but with the automatic instinct of a generation that processes experience through documentation. Later, I imagined, she posted it. Something brief and honest about how it made her feel. And people responded with small red hearts, because it is good to feel things, and it is good to say so, and this is more or less where we have arrived.

The pharmacy opens at eight. When it does, he gathers the mustard-coloured sleeping bag and the canvas pillow-bag and he goes somewhere I do not follow, and the doorway becomes a doorway again, and the street resumes its ordinary business of people going purposefully somewhere that is not here.

Today is day eleven. I counted again. I do not know why counting feels important except that it is the smallest possible refusal to let the arithmetic stay invisible.

It is not enough. I know it is not enough. But I am trying to stay honest about what I am doing and what I am not doing, which seems like the least that clarity requires — and perhaps also the beginning, very tentatively, of something else.

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