to trail a stranger

 I love the fact that Handke has said more than once how he enjoys trailing a stranger.  Here he describes it in The Second Sword, 84.  "Over the years it had become a kind of sport for me to trail a stranger, out of more than mere curiosity, on a hunch, and also--the decisive factor?--a sense of duty, from Métro line to Métro line, on metropolitan buses to the outskirts and then on the regional bus, and each of those sorties had afforded me richly satisfying hours or half-days, free of interactions or confrontations, and had stayed with me as a source of stories, always ready to be explored anew, far more than a mere pastime."