A TRAIN WAS travelling northwards from London through the grey squalls of a winter’s afternoon. From a corner seat in one of its carriages a man watched his country with the scurried perspective of a railway traveller: crossing fields at a bias, chipping off the corner of a hill, barked at by sudden brick walls and engulfed in tunnels. Desolate suburbias came and went and the tarred telegraph poles kept pace. As daylight diminished rain streaked the glass at flat angles, blurred and wobbled the scene, pooling at the corners of the pane in trembling pockets. It occurred to this man (who had dog hairs on his otherwise immaculate trouser cuffs) that he had spent much of his life in a compartment, alone and quite still, while outside it an activity called travel went on whose images beyond the window – ever different, always the same – represented not distance but time flashing by. Days, months and years had reeled past until here he was towards the end of a lifetime not going anywhere at sixty miles an hour.
After a while he fell asleep and sleeping dreamed a vivid dream. Later, when events brought back the inessentials of this dream, the fragments had about them a satisfactory, vatic air as if they were true parts of the man he believed himself to be.
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