On Trains

How people can sit on a Belgian train alone & not be moved to higher thoughts, I do not understand.

I mean, sure, there’s the exception where you’re wedged between two other people and you are barely able to move – I suggest a trip to india to put this in perspective, by the way. But apart from that, people who travel the railroads of our glorious country alone have no excuse not to be soaked in metaphysical slumberings.

You see the houses zooomming past. If you’re aimed in the “forward” direction, this will give you a sense of the future speeding up to you and flashing past. You will see new vistas loom on the horizon, rapidly approach and be history already. A history of which you will not have to think about, when sitting in the “forward” direction, unless you are of an exceptionally gloomy mind. No; when sitting in the “forward direction”, your thoughts will go to future expeditions to the north pole, to the moon, to that girl you fancied in that pub once. You marvel at the colourful shapes present in the skies, as they are in the daring expressions of youth, the graffiti. You witness growing fields, strong trees and the current almost leaping of the electricity poles in delight at your approach. You are in anticipation.

When sitting in the “backward” direction, however, you will be confronted with your past. It will, fittingly, be too painful to turn your head to the future, your eyes will remained locked up the things zooommed past. People and houses getting smaller, churches and pitiful clumps of shrubberies are receding in the distance. Your mind will wander towards those things both ancient and recent past. Thoughts might meander in the realms of the dead, thinking about a loved or hated one, they might take a stroll towards the trip you took yesteryear, with all those funny people that you vowed to see again and haven’t heard from since. You’ll witness the ugly building sites, the cranes looming over them, not as storks carrying the new born, but as vultures patiently waiting to pick the carcass of its last shivering flesh. Already the meat seems pervaded with fungus and crawling bacteria, the tribal art and its producers.

Of course, there is no need to let the mind wander outside the confines of the train space. The train in itself, the moving vehicle, snaking through the country and through the cityside, always moving, always still. We’ve all witnessed the station slowly leaving our train behind. The unmoved mover.

The train is like a log, slowly braving a quick-witted river, playfully nibbling at its haunches. The passengers are the small animals, the vermin, temporarily seeking shelter from the bristling brook, only to realize, after a while, that the nature of the log is defined by the water they seek to evade. They will then cast themselves back into the water whence they came; jettison we are and to jettison shall we return.

This little peninsula of temporary peace is generally inhabited by other members of our lustrous race – I refer, of course, to the more general human race, not to any Caucasian or Negroid subspecies - and are thus somewhat comparable to an early 20th century Zoo. Think : big Iron Fences. Think : observing the Other from a safe distance. Think : being equally observed by this distant other.
The human species is a relatively interesting one in comparison to most of the living world, especially when you are not in possession of a microscope and a vivid imagination – which I, coincidentally, happen to have, but I dare not presume that to be the case for you. It will talk with unrelentless passion, despite not having anything to talk about – yes, pot, kettle, haha –, it will gesture wildly when on the phone, seemingly unaware that the recipient of those movements isn’t, in fact, receiving them. It will gaze ponderously outside, thinking about imminent past and former future.

When observing the myriad examples of our species, these fellow participants of the great marathon called life – in which you gallop towards the finish whether you intend to or not –, how can one not be moved to deeper thoughts, as I am, on the social, the political, the economical, the psychological and everything? One, unless one is blessed by the absence of a conscious mind, can not.