There’s a balcony overlooking the street above the lobby of the Hotel Carrera in Santiago, Chile. These gents came in from the street—they were not of the hotel—and sat for several hours after breakfast time. I watched to see what they were doing, which was simply sitting and looking out at the street from which they had come. They did not talk to each other and I reckoned that they did not even know each other. After an hour or more they left, without a word, one by one.

It was similar the next day, and I was unable to non-invasively determine how many were repeats. They were always men. As a cowboy sociologist I wondered what personal rewards accrued by coming together without communication to look out a window at a quite ordinary street scene. I wondered at my solitary self watching them watch.

Nothing is so rewarding as a stubborn examination of the obvious.

Oliver Wendell Holmes