Hopscotch

I am reading a book called, "Hopscotch" by Julio Cortazar. It has this great passage that i am going to write here. I like how it builds a scene full of humanity. It is a bit critical at the end. The character's voice not so much mine, but i agree with his observations and the point he strives to make. It is set in Paris. The scene begins after the main character has witnessed a man being hit by a car and is carried off by an ambulance. A crowd watching the commotion has fled to a cafe after it started to rain.

In the cafe protected by the cold (a matter of going in and having a glass of wine), a group of bricklayers were talking with the man behind the bar. Two students were reading and writing at one table and Oliveira saw them look up and look at the bricklayers, go back to their books or notebooks, look up again. From one glass cage to another, look, withdraw, look: that's all there was to it. Up above the sidewalk section of the cafe, which was closed, a young woman on the second floor seemed to be sewing or cutting out a dress by the window. Her upswept hair was moving in time to what she was doing and Oliveira tried to picture her thoughts, her shears, her children who would be coming back from school any moment now, her husband finishing work in am office or in a bank. The bricklayers, the students, the woman, now a bum turned the corner of the street with a bottle of red wine sticking out of his pocket, pushing a baby carriage filled with old newspapers, tin cans, torn and dirty cloths, a headless doll, a package with a fishtail sticking out. The bricklayers, the students, the woman, the bum, and in a booth looking like someone condemned to the pillory, LOTERIE NATIONALE, an old woman with unrepatriated bits of straggly hair popping out from underneath a kind of gray bonnet, blue mittens on her hands, TIRAGE MERCREDI, waiting but not in wait for customers, a charcoal brazier by her feet, ecased in her vertical coffin, motionless, half-frozen, offering good fortune and God knows what, clots of ideas, senile commonplaces, the teacher who used to give her candy when she was a girl, a husband killed on the Somme, a traveling-salesman son, at night her garret without running water, a three-day soup, beouf bourguignon which is cheaper than a cut of meat, TIRAGE MERCREDI. The bricklayers, the students, the woman, the bum, the lottery woman, every group, everybody in his glass cage, but let an old man fall under a car and right away there is a general running to the scene of the accident, an animated exchange of opinion, of criticism, disparities and coincidences until it starts to rain again and the bricklayers go back to the bar, the students to their table, the X's to X and the Z's to the Z.
"Only by living absurdly is it possible to break out of this infinite absurdity," repeated Oliviera. "But Jesus, I'm going to get soaked, I've got to get someplace."