No Man is an Island

In environmental debates and courses, you learn how all human activities connect us with each other, especially through the globalization. There are so many angles from which you can look at it; economical and ethical being the extremes I guess. But this time I came to think of that expression in a totally different situation.

A while back, I was on a train to Gothenburg, starting to get a bit bored, tired and hungry. The guy sitting next to me made me think evil thoughts, because he was blocking the passage way with his computer-, phone- and iPod cables. He also had a lot of coke bottles standing around and a very big coat, taking up a lot of space. Another thing about him that was drawing my evil side’s attention was his almost constant and extremely loud conversations with his girlfriend over the phone. I, having some issues with drawing too much attention to myself, sat patiently waiting for the right moment to ask him to let me pass so that I could visit the powder room. (Never going in first class before, I was actually wondering what the toilets would be like… Would they smell less? Were they cleaned more thoroughly?) But the playing and talking didn’t seem to have an end.

Funny thing about first class is that there are no families, and no pets. No small girls clutching their colourful guinea pig cages. No moms reading stories or dads taking their sons to the bathroom. It was mostly well established people and couples, having conversations about important matters. The train conductors were extra chirpy and I wonder if they even had a different outfit, although I didn’t go to second class to check, so I don’t know. In first class your legs get more space, you get free internet connection, news papers and tea or coffee. Not that I had access to any of the latter, considering the guy mentioned above. I also brought my own news paper, not having been in the first class salon before. So this is the setup. Then something else happened.

Fifteen minutes before arrival, we all heard a bump and then the train started braking hard. When I say hard, I mean that it was noticeable that the driver tried to get the train to a full stop, but I was also thinking that it was surprisingly smooth. Nobody got thrown on the floor, but I would have gotten a cup of coffee in my lap had I not been fast and alert. During the stopping distance, there was a crunching noise, like something was dragged under the train, or possibly run over. Like memories from your childhood, it’s hard to know if this was really happening though, or if it’s constructed by the brain after hearing other people saying it a lot, or in the case of childhood memories, having seen a photo.

So there we were, in the middle of nowhere and without any information on what was going on. While the train was breaking I had enough time to think that any real danger was probably already out of the picture. The bump also gave a clue. Pretty soon, sooner than you’d think considering what had just happened, the driver announced that a person had been hit. Impressive how stable his voice was, all comforting and reassuring. Instantly, all the personnel came running through the train towards the front. A lady started crying loudly and people started talking about how horrifying it all was.

In this situation, I am one of those people prone to exchange glances with other people. Assessing the situation together, silently stating how you are in this together. This time, though, I was sitting next to a guy who chose to ignore me and instead calling his girlfriend to loudly declaim how “they had wasted somebody” and that he was annoyed “like everybody else”. He actually rose from his seat to do this, but by that time I felt stunned and didn’t take the opportunity to go the bathroom. A few minutes later, I highly regretted this, when the rescue team decided to cut the power. Did I mention this was late in the evening and it was all dark out? Well, it got very dark inside the train too. 

Considering myself one of the more relaxed people in our much stressed society, it still felt odd to just sit there for three hours. You get cut off. You can’t use the internet (or even your computer if you packed the power cord in the wrong bag, like I did), you can’t read because it’s pitch black. Outside there were people searching under the train with flashlights, a number of blinking lights from police and ambulance being the only other source of light. You sit there and you know that something terrible just happened, but you can’t do anything, you are not allowed to move and in the dead silence you don’t really want to call anyone. Ask anyone who knows me and they’ll tell you how asocial I can be. At this point even I would have liked some human companionship. And the things that up until then had been bothering me about my closest neighbour all got shadowed by my growing annoyance of the forced solitude in which he put me.

 To finish the story about what happened, they tried to console the crying lady with some lukewarm food and then they told us that it had been a suicide. They knew because the person had been standing still on the tracks with their back towards the train, and then slowly turned as it approached. The body was dragged along and then let go some 300 meters behind the current position of the train. Its procedure to replace the staff in these situations, which seemed reasonable considering the attendants couldn’t answer a single question without getting side tracked and losing their thought. So after the authority was done, some three hours after the incident, and the new staff was on board, the train slowly rolled in to the station in Gothenburg. From there we all had to go with buses and I ended up at my final destination a little more than four hours later than expected. No goodbyes, no exchange of relief, no nothing. Leaving the train I saw all the people from the second class carts, and I was thinking that I bet I would have felt better sitting with them.

Disclosure

Lately I've seemed to be totally unable to finish a book. I can’t get through Foucault, never get done with Eco. Not even the by comparison easily read Edelfeldt manages to prolong my attention span. A couple of days ago I started on Leviathan by Paul Auster, in the hopes of getting my reading back. Considering I’ve never really liked neither The New York Trilogy nor the Book of Illusions, this might have been a lost cause from the beginning. On the other hand, Paul Auster is a well renowned author and I thought his fluent language would be able to help me in my misery. (Well, maybe it isn’t misery in the way it could have been, but if you are used to taking to reading when you need a break from life, not being able to do so is quite disturbing.)

It took me some time to understand what was going on and the answer, my friends, is this: People are talking too much. Somewhere along the road of intellectual history, being able to express your thought in as many words as possible, has become the attribute of knowledge and aptitude. An example: when I took classes in philosophy, the people that were loudest and most talkative were considered the most brilliant. Even repeating what was just said or pointing out the obvious, gave applause from the rest of us, either being so much in awe of their confidence that we didn’t listen properly, or ourselves completely lacking the confidence to speak up, and so making this misconception persevere. Some of my comrades also thought gesticulating a lot when you talk is a sign of intelligence, but that must just be momentary confusion, yes?

Anyway, back to the talking. You know how everyone stops and listen when the wise man speaks? I’m imagining some kind of Buddha, which is quiet for a hundred years and then utters one, very mysterious, sentence. There might be something in there, you think, so I’d better listen really carefully. Or the wise Indian, who is the only one in the camp who knows anything about medicine; you’d better listen to him! (And then there is your mother, who you are supposed to listen to, but never do. A whole other story there…) Might it be the case that somewhere along the way we forgot who we are supposed to listen to, why people are talking, and that now we believe that anyone who manages to say something we don’t immediately understand, is our superior? “Say something better yourself then!” you might object. To which I will answer, that I’m not sure that I can, but I will declare that I am probably capable of saying the exact same thing, in far less words. 

Now, this might all be true, or the fact might be that I am just too lazy to read books where the letters are tiny, the sentences long and in which there is no dialogue anywhere in sight.