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Nathan Beard. Exit Music #58 (The Effects of Passing Through One Another). Panel 2 of 5. 2017. Acrylic on panel. 48 x 36 inches.

The texts that ballast this issue span the globe. From undocumented workers of “Sanctuary City” to displaced Rohingya of Bangladesh to a disoriented New York City FedEx driver heroically “shouldering forward” into a frozen and isolating world, they capture indelible moments and frame urgent issues with images and impressions that provoke us to more than a casual sense of just “passing through.” Art takes a stand against transience, reminding us of the significance of every moment. In the sparkling waters of Dan Lundin’s Catalina Island and the winter midnight of a New York blizzard captured in William Walker’s radiant prose, the artists find beauty in the moment and strength in perseverance. It seems especially apt that Walker’s narrator is reading Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” on the subway. The allusion prompted us to include one of Gustave Doré’s illustrations, a moment frozen and vivid in time. “I bent forward, taking careful steps as the blindness closed in around me,” Walker writes, prompting us not to be blind, but to see. We hope you will read his eloquent final paragraph more than once. And we hope you sense its resonance with the December subway in Hannah Weyer’s opening story: “The car was crowded, but she wedged her way along the aisle . . . into a pocket of space near a center pole. At rush hour, even this was something to be grateful for.”