Sights of life are reduced mercilessly to pictures whipping by; they cannot be anything more in the eyes of the hurrying traveller. That character of inevitability is inescapable about industrialism: everything has been compacted, shrunk into an image of its essence, packaged, sealed, stamped and sold. Even summer rain, which would in a past era have coursed willfully along the stern bark of a banyan or a Saraca, is now identified as an argent streak slapped against the Perspex.
I'm not complaining, however: I don't yearn for the slower journey or the prolonged farewell. I yearn for the loneliness that the fervour of a modern lifestyle should ultimately deliver. The quick opening and shutting of doors, the picturisation of a smile, the slapdash demise of the raindrop, the diminished journey, the extended destination. The short-lived beauty that I behold through the window befits the needs of a new world. Even the brewing cyclone and the storms descending from the distant mountains do little to wither the black smoke out of a factory before I lock my gaze with the next miracle.
Even the journey is not a journey anymore: it is a jarring and tumultuous transition from the serenity of home to the invariance of a four-hour train ride to the visceral duties due the workplace. The traveler simple vanishes at one location and appears at another, only to vanish again and reappear, an existence that is direly contiguous. Perhaps it is for the best, perhaps it is for the worst, but it is, and that's the truth.
Would that I had to trace by foot what I was instead doing by train, and would have despaired. The persistence of visions would have broken my spirit, the conviction of changelessness discouraged me from my enterprise. Accuse me of what you will—fickle-mindedness, for sure—but why must the I be culpable? If you would rather be yourself and don many masks than keep changing your person while wearing an eternal guise, then what more would you ask for?
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