In one of his short pieces that hovers uncomfortably between being a novel, an essay, and an exercise in clinical observation, Georges Perec muses that he’s missed his true calling: rather than a writer, he should have become a controller for the Paris City Transit Authority. The revelation comes at the end of a day spent sitting in the same spot noting down (among other things) the passage of pedestrians to and from the metro and the frequency with which the variously numbered buses pass by, some full, some empty. But, more subtly, his reasoning goes as follows: if the writer’s task is to record events in time; to bring into sharp focus the trajectories of human lives, both singularly and in all their crowded multiplicity, the contingencies—be these of chance or design—of a hundred, or a thousand, or a million comings-together, transfers, and leave-takings; to intuit and communicate their overall rhythm; and, beyond even that, to peer beneath their surface and reveal the fabric holding the whole thing together, unpick and reconstruct its very weft and warp—well, the transit controller does exactly this.

By the same logic, I would suggest that the most noble and heroic thing to be in this life, or perhaps in any other, is the dodgem jockey. You know what I mean: those guys who work the bumper cars in fairgrounds. Not the fat, older one who sits in the control booth—Perec’s fantasy—but the lithe young things who cling to the backs of moving cars, hopping from one to the next.