A Journey at Dusk: an interlude

Sometimes, after a journey out of London, I return by train to one of the main rail termini. The train slows as it journeys through the suburbs and, seizing a quiet moment, I will stare out of the window, pressing my forehead against the cold and condensation of the pane. The track passes the backs of houses and of business premises, it overlooks factories and warehouses. Commonly it is twilight, grey-blue-brown, light enough to see, with the trees and bushes of gardens and embankments filigreed silhouettes. Lights have been switched on and scenes are sharply illuminated. I catch glimpses of offices and homes. Hopper paintings and Vermeer interiors pass in seconds to be succeeded by industrial yards washed by sodium lamps. Forklift trucks move pallets and tarpaulined loads in the figures of a stuttering dance.

Watching this is a benign voyeurism. It gives the overpowering sense of other lives being lived. People I do not, and will not know, whose lives brush past mine, intent on their own course. Perhaps strangely, I find this affirming rather than alienating. Entering the city in this way I observe too, the thousands, hundreds of thousands, of windows each signalling a home or a workplace; the houses and back gardens; the articulation of streets and buildings, of signage and illumination.

As I write this, I am on a plane, flying out at dusk, from Frankfurt airport, heading East. I have been processed, moved through the vast industrial expanse of buildings and gates, transported across runways and consigned to my destination. The dots and lines of suburb and city, and of autobahns, are strung out below me. The view is different to that from the train but the impression is the same, of the scale and complexity of the human enterprise, of our autonomies, and simultaneously our inter-connectedness.