subway types

Guys - busboys, deliverers, construction laborers - earnestly writing in little spiral-bound lined notebooks, in big round block letters, with a blue ball-point pen.  Not studying or communicating, just writing to - well, what?  I tend to think of these as calmly-contained but inwardly passionate people.  Or hotly intelligent without much scope for opportunity of thought.  Self-contained or context-bound, that is.  A small whorl of inner life.  Comparatively talentless brethren of Emily Dickinson, but brethren all the same.  That last sentence could be applied to me, I suppose, though none of what preceeded it.  Makes the whole world kin - the subway, I mean.  That and unfounded assumptions about others.