"Awareness, Like a Philter-passing Virus..."

I take the words to mean that once we become aware of something, we can never entirely lose that awareness. The quoted line, or something very like it, jumped out at me from Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet when I read it for the second time, in my forties.

By then I had the life experience as well as the linguistic and cultural knowledge to understand the book much more clearly than I had twenty years before. That particular "philter-passing virus" of awareness has remained with me, and I've always remembered that Durrell line.

Today something else passed through my one-way "philter." I can't believe I didn't notice it before, over the course of riding the Sky Train for nearly twenty years.

Waiting this afternoon in King Edward Station, I observed what the engineers had put in place on the overhead metal trusses to discourage birds from perching up there and then letting fly and sullying the freshly arranged coiffures of the waiting commuters.

A series of pins standing like porcupine quills stops the birds from lighting where they shouldn't. How rarely we become aware of our dependence on such finely detailed planning and design.