There is nothing more everyday or wonderful we can ever meet than the opposites, and I found them—in particular, Continuity and Discontinuity—in a man painting a yellow line to mark the border of Weehawken and Hoboken, New Jersey. I think what Eli Siegel asks about these opposites in his 15 Questions about beauty describes what affected me in this surprising situation:

Is there to be found in every work of art a certain progression, a certain indissoluble presence of relation, a design which makes for continuity?—and is there to be found, also, the discreteness, the individuality, the brokenness of things: the principle of discontinuity?

This man is a discrete, individual element in an abstract composition of other discrete, individual elements. The bright, yellow paint can, and its lid held in his left hand stand out in the muted griminess of the scene. Their circularity seems to represent the completeness, the continuity he is trying to achieve as he paints within the precise borders of the tape on the ground. There is the yellow line itself: in process—flowing and broken—leading one’s eye to the darkness of the doorway opposite. Then, incongruously, a yellow broom lying on the ground emerges from that same darkness, bridging hidden depths with what we can see.