Tuesday, February 8, 2005, 6:19pm
Tuesday, February 8, 2005, 6:19pm
Since we left South Station tonight the 6:05pm Worcester Express has been making good time. The football fans of this morning have long since melted from the city, so if anything is unusual tonight it is how the train is less full than most nights. There was still a tinge of twilight as I crossed the 1899 Summer Street Bridge above the partially frozen channel. The tinge is gone now – long ago fading into an omnipresent and seemingly endless blackness as we streak west through the night.
I miss those very few summer days in New England where at high noon my shadow falls almost at my feet. In the dead of winter it stretches a dozen feet, and during commuting hours closer to a hundred. Farther south the loss of winter sunlight hours is not so great. Perhaps just for that reason maybe we’ll move farther south someday. The summer days aren’t as long, but it would be worth the trade-off to have a little more wintertime daylight. Here I am – primarily of Nordic stock – complaining about the shorter days in winter. In Norway some places lose the sun entirely for several weeks either side of the solstice.
A moving train is a very strange state of existence. We are neither where we were nor where we are going to be, and being -here- passing this exact patch of town or forest or city is so constantly changing that ‘here’ has no solid meaning. Perhaps if I focus on the interior of the cabin, then ‘here’ could be the configuration of the seats and the sickly color of the lights and the chatter of conversation among its temporary inhabitants.
Yet except for the pastimes that eat away the minutes nothing feels real here – wherever it is, or at least real in the sense that it will last or ever be exactly the same again. Each train ride is a unique event and even though very much the same, each time is as new as the first time. The routine of the railroad and the routine of my daily commute create a sense of repetition for me. And it only feels the same each day because I allow this impression to solidify.
Train travel is a very good invention as inventions come along. Except for animal-riding, wagons and buggies, riverboats and canoes, dog sleds and foot traffic there is nothing more ancient as a means of transportation in this country. In most places railroads are older than overland travel by skis (Norway being the rare exception), and certainly much older, by nearly a century, than automobiles and airplanes. Even bicycles aren’t as old as the iron horse except perhaps a few odd examples, and I’m pretty sure that roller skates and roller blades, snowboards and skateboards are far more modern. I suppose ice-skating has been around a long time, yet it’s hardly dependable as way to haul freight or a weary set of paying passengers on any sort of reliable schedule.
The sense of permanence I feel for the railroad – that feeling of something that has always been here – is just a sense – not a reality. In reality every single idea that has ever been thought is an invention and just because a particular idea is very old and very well rooted does not change that fact.
Everything that is not happenstance is design – even those ideas that feel as though they’ve been around since the beginning of time.
To think otherwise simply opens the door to ideology – which is a special form of idolatry where ideas themselves become sacred objects.
