Monday, September 22, 2008
Trains
There's something deeply strange about traveling by train. You get on it and it goes and goes. Staring out the windows, you are struck both by the closeness of things, by the sensation that you could reach out and touch these leaves, these houses, but also by the impossibility of contact; the sheer velocity of the train isolates it from it's surroundings, makes it a world unto itself with the bright but unreachable outside as good as images thrown on the glass. Things burst into sight and just as quickly pass away, and you are left feeling strangely unsure of what's there outside the cabin. And then you arrive at a new station and a normal speed, and things pick up just as before, the faces are more or less familiar, the buildings more or less the same, a little more French in the cafes and a little more English in the accent.
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4 comments:
It's that kind of strangeness I love: planes just pick you up and set you down, but trains speed you through in a wondrous tube.
Yeah... I think there's a great Ed Abbey essay on that subject... He basically decides that plane travel is not travel after a flight to australia....
I know this appears to be a really pretentious thing to comment, but what you said reminded my of one of my favorite favorite ts eliot passages ever from Four Quartets. I always think of it when the train has to stop unexpectedly and I creep myself out with it. (I had to space the lines 'coz comment formatting sucks--each of these should be on one line, not two.) ...
"I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope"
That's amazing, and not at all pretentious. I'm going to try not to think about that whenever I next use the subway.
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