“The
universe (which others call the Library) …” — Jorge Luis Borges
Like
everyone who’s ever lived, I was born on the train and I will die on the train.
If the train rounds a bend, the eye can see no terminus to the line of train
cars in either direction. Most have concluded that the train exists without
end. I have yet to make up my mind.
The
scenery changes slowly but with certitude. The train crosses mountains,
deserts, rivers and forests. Never the same place twice, and never any people
outside. I am fifty-eight years old. In my life, the train has not stopped, nor
slowed, nor changed tracks, nor reversed direction. I fall asleep each night to
the familiar gentle swaying of the carriage. I wake to the clack of wheel on
track, my life’s metronome. The sound is ever present, varying slightly over
bridges and through tunnels. With the exception of times of insomnia, it’s
often beneath my awareness.
Each
carriage has two floors, the second a copy of the first. I met a very old man,
long ago, and asked him about the train and his memories. His tales were
rambling, jumbled, though one detail stood out. The carriages of his youth had
only a single floor. On this he was adamant. I’ve met none who can confirm, but
the idea remains lodged in my mind.
The
windows do not open. There are no doors, save those linking one carriage to the
next. No place to de-board. Looking for an exit became my calling for a time.
Most are content to stay within several carriages of that of their birth; they
found my search ridiculous. “An exit?” they’d say. “Never thought of
that.”
The
carriages follow a repeating pattern, and the pattern never changes. Sleeping
carriage, living carriage, dining carriage. The sleeping carriages contain only
rows of uniform beds, each large enough to fit two adults. The lights in these
carriages wax and wane with unchanging regularity. Shutters reveal food in the
dining carriages thrice daily. Living carriages contain tables, chairs, and
bookshelves. The bookshelves are filled with nothing but diaries, each with an
attached pen. Scribblings, sketches, and the occasional essay from other
passengers often fill the pages. I’ve scanned the diaries in countless
carriages. Most are blank.
These
very words fill one such diary, a book I picked up thousands of carriages past,
and that I have carried ever since. It’s a record of my travels. When I die, it
will sit forgotten on a bookshelf. When I first set out, I sought to track the
number of carriages I moved through. I made a mark in my diary for each one.
After a year, I realized I’d have a diary filled with nothing but my tally, and
so gave up the practice. Incidentally, I’ve happened across many such diaries,
pages filled with mark after mark, though their authors neglected to write down
what it was they were counting.
Many
of my fellow passengers object to my use of that term, passenger. They
prefer conductor, along with the sense of agency the term implies.
In either case, passenger or conductor, it makes no difference to the train.
The train goes where it will.
But
where is it going? And why? These questions grip us. Apart from eating,
sleeping, and gazing out the windows, one has few ways to occupy one’s time.
Some, like me, choose to travel. If you were to ask twenty travelers why they
travel, you’d receive twenty answers. Yet each traveler’s hope is fundamentally
the same, because it is the same question that drives each of us:
What
is the train?
Most
travelers give up the search as fruitless, pick a carriage, and live out their
days. Many trick themselves into believing they’ve found The Answer, and so
justify abandoning their quest.
I
have not settled. I still search. My family and friends continued their lives
in a carriage far, far from this one. Everyone I used to know is now beyond my
reach. It’s been decades since I left my home, and I shall die long before I
could return. I used to regret the choice I made, my answer to the decision.
Now when I think back, I no longer wonder if my choice was right or wrong. The
distinction, I realize, doesn’t exist. It’s not regret—the desire to correct a
mistake. It’s curiosity. I want to know what lies beyond the closed doors of
fate. I have no wish to go back and decide anew, but instead to know what might
have been.
All
who travel make the decision. It defines their search, and most choose the
same. Which direction? In which direction will you travel the train? The
direction the train is moving, or the way from which the train has come? Forward or backward? Behind or ahead? I am
one of the few who travels behindward, as it were. People see my choice as
moving into the past. Forward is where we’re going. The future is forward,
ahead, and so travelers choose the direction of the train’s movement. The
future holds promise, and newness, and infinite possibility. We’ve come from
the past. The past holds mistakes, and regret, and life fixed in time. I no
longer agree with these associations, but human migration on the train
generally moves aheadward, not behindward, and so it’s a strong illusion that
links behind with past and ahead with future. The young move forward, up the
train. Only the dead stay behind.
Regardless
of direction, most tire quickly of travel. They find no answers in the endless
chain of carriages. They miss the people they know, and mistrust the people
they meet. They stop their search and stay where they are, or if the distance
they ranged is not too great, return home. Occasionally they believe they’ve
found a better life in another set of carriages, and return to bring their
families up the train.
The
decision doesn’t matter, but it was many years before I understood why, many
years before I made peace with the direction I chose. It is not merely the
pattern of carriages that repeats, but the pattern of human existence as well.
It’s a discovery learned only by those who devote their lives to travel. One
must journey through many thousands of carriages to see it. I’ve met few indeed
who’ve shared the revelation. There have been six, to be exact, all moving
forward, our paths crossing. When we meet, there’s little to speak of. We have
fewer answers than when we began. We sit and exchange small stories of what’s
to come. We sit quietly, in mutual recognition of how little we know, before it
comes time to move on.
Here
is the story of my revelation.
I
had travelled behindwards for many years. As I went, I saw what I expected. I
passed through community after community. I saw rich and poor, old and young,
sick and healthy. An empty carriage here, one filled with the dead and dying
there. I was stolen from and lied to and healed and helped. I was loved and
hated, and returned what I received in equal measure.
I
met untold numbers of communities, each with their explanations and beliefs
about the train, and none more provable than any other. I learned quickly,
though, never to point out such a thing. Though some communities would respond
with no more than raised eyebrows and knowing smiles, there were places where dissent
could prove fatal. For some, there was never anything more viciously defended
than a community’s intangible explanations for how the train worked: where it
was going, what moved it, what we were doing on it, and so on. There, the life
of the idea took precedence over all. Meeting these people made me cross and
cynical, though I was young and didn’t know any better.
Eventually,
I reached a group of carriages where the people told me I mustn’t continue. I
must not travel further behindwards. They pleaded and threatened and cajoled me
to turn round, and when it was clear I intended to go on, some tried to hold me
by force. They told me there was nothing there, nothing to find, that their
carriages were the last fringes of humanity on an infinite train, and all that
lay beyond was infinite emptiness. An unceasing string of carriages where only
insanity and death await the foolish traveller. The void. I laughed and told
them that death awaits us all. At this their expressions hardened against me.
“Let him go, then,” they said, “if he’s determined to seek his end.”
For
an interminable time it was as they said. I passed through empty carriages.
Empty diaries on bookshelves, empty tables and chairs, and empty beds, made and
unused in silent sleeping carriages. The dining carriages fed me and no one
else. I ate alone, pondering what they’d told me. Could it have been true?
Could they truly have been the last?
My
notes in my diary grew wild, ravings from a man long deprived of company. I
never prayed so frequently before or since. I became obsessed with trying to
learn whether the dining carriages offered their meals even when unoccupied,
but this was an impossible task, as I could not observe the carriage without
also occupying it.
Then
came the day when I opened a carriage door and found people again, or rather,
their remains. Until now, I had never seen so many of the dead in one place. I
knew not how long they’d been there; long enough that their bones gleamed white
in the carriage lamplight, flesh and any shred of clothing having long since
disintegrated. Even some of the skeletons themselves were returning to dust, as
if dissolving into the floor of the train.
The
people I had met often carried their dead to the second floor of their
carriage, and each community eventually designated entire carriages as the
final resting place for their loved ones: a carriage or two converted to a
mausoleum. But this was different. I wandered behindwards amongst them for many
months, a vast swath of the train filled with nothing but bones.
What
had happened? Sickness, or war, or some other unknowable catastrophe? There was
no answer. Though I could discern that the diaries in this part of the train
once held writing, the marks were too faded to read.
I
despaired, but could not imagine turning back. The carriages filled with
ancient dead came to an end, and once again I was faced with a span of empty
carriages. What was worse, the loneliness of unoccupied spaces, or the patient
ambiguity of the company of bones? I chose hope promised by the unknown, and so
carried on.
Then
came the day, more than four years after I’d seen another person, when I
stumbled through a carriage door and was once again among the living. Their
speech was familiar but strange, not quite my language, but similar in subtle
ways. The vocabulary, with the exception of the words train and passenger,
contained nothing I could recognize, but as they kindly nursed me back to
health, I became aware that grammar and sentence structure were no different
from that of the language I knew. My time with this community, on the frontier
of the great emptiness, was the longest I spent in a single place since my
travels began. Need and immersion drove me to learn their language quickly.
Once
I could communicate, I told them of my journey. Nobody believed me. There was
no “other side” of the emptiness. Periodically, a traveler from this community
would set forth into the emptiness, always returning, finding exactly what they
expected, which was nothing. Apparently,
there was but one traveler, long, long ago, who had never returned. They
assumed that I was he, alone for so long I had forgotten.
This
person could not be me, I thought, for the timing was all wrong. But their
certainty led me to doubt my own experiences, my very story. Had I lost my mind
in the desolation? Had I been alone for longer than I remembered? The
dissonance drove me to resume my travels, and in a way, I’m grateful. Without
such doubt, I may have chosen to settle. The further I went, the more secure became
my sanity. Though the people I met all spoke this new language, each community
behaved in ways entirely familiar to me. In a superficial sense, these communities
were like nothing I’d seen. And yet, to me, the necessities of life on the
train made all of them exactly the same.
Suddenly,
it mattered not how far I traveled.
I
was always home.
For
all that was new and strange, there remained those fundaments of human life,
endlessly familiar.
The
train was patterns within patterns. I began my travels knowing only the pattern
of the carriages, and I came to learn the patterns of the people within them.
So, when I met a second great emptiness, I was not surprised. I steeled myself
for the isolation, and went on. My second experience was similar to my first,
though I was better prepared for those I met on the other side. I accepted
their help, and encouraged the stories they told of my miraculous appearance
from the void. I learned a third language, at the same time similar to and
different from the others. These three languages were but different ways of
describing the same things.
These revelations answered nothing of my
underlying questions about the train, but they stripped my search of its
urgency. I was left with pure curiosity, the desire to understand, and the
acceptance that my understanding wasn’t important. I became more and more aware
of the patterns I encountered.
There
are patterns to the diaries, for example. Nonsense fills most of them, no
matter where I look. Rambling thoughts, sketches, games between passengers. But
all civilizations have sects that put the diaries to some greater use. It’s
common to pass through carriages in which passengers devote their time to
recording all they see from the train’s windows. Groups of passengers sit and
record as much as they can of the environs through which the train passes.
I’ve
spent many days reading such diaries. Occasionally, the observer becomes
fixated on the possibility of life, human or otherwise, outside the train. Some
convince themselves that they see evidence of such hidden among rock
formations, tree trunks, or bends in the rivers. The result of this search is
often the same. They conclude there exists a vast conspiracy of powerful beings
beyond the train. This conspiracy controls the train, and by extension,
controls us. Amongst them I listen and nod but always move on quickly,
promising to spread the word.
I,
too, have wondered at what lies beyond the train. Through the windows we appear
to see other carriages, and if we can see ourselves, and we exist, then so too
must aught else appearing outside. I gave up these thoughts as useless many
years past. If there is a larger world outside the train, our access is limited
entirely by what the windows reveal. For me, the train is the world. Without an
exit, there is nothing but speculation. Of all the questions I hope one day to
answer, the question of what lies outside the train seems forever beyond my
grasp. A fellow traveller from my past once said something I still remember: if
the train is truly infinite, then the world outside must also be infinite, and
an infinite thing into another infinite thing is simply one. For me this
illuminates nothing, but I liked the idea, and so wrote it down. It’s nonsense
of course, a paradox contained in a trick of mathematics, but the sound of it
stirs something within me.
It
was in my third desolation that I happened upon a diary that changed much. Most
desolation diaries are unreadable, but some subtlety of time and decay had
spared several passages of this one. It described a version of the train that
has gripped me to this day.
Every
civilization has its explanation of the train: what it is, where it’s going,
what moves it. Though each explanation is nuanced, until that moment, each
explanation had shared one central tenant: somewhere, far far behindward, the
train comes to an end, and somewhere, far far forward, the real conductor
resides, in his vast and powerful engine. There lies the true motive force and
driver of the train, whom many call God. Further, everyone assumes that the
train is static in structure, that this train is the exact same train in which
everyone has always lived, and will continue to be the exact same train forever
more.
But
this lost civilization, those who were consigned to be my third desolation, saw
the train not as a line with beginning and end, but as an enormous loop. The
diary states that if one walks in a single direction for long enough, one
eventually returns to the carriage from which he or she began. Indeed, it seems
that undertaking this journey was a rite of passage in this civilization,
completed as a matter of course. I have trouble understanding the length of
this circular journey. If a civilization sent its members to walk the entire
train as a rite of passage, judging by my own experiences, they’d be many
decades older—at the very least—upon returning. Not practical.
Three
possible explanations occur to me, none of which are mutually exclusive. First,
the tale is mere fable or allegory, and the loop these ancient people walked
was symbolic. Second, the train’s structure is not static. Third—and most
likely—they or I or all of us are mistaken on some other key assumption. For
example, I am certain I have never returned to the carriage of my birth.
However, the tale of one-story carriages, to which I alluded earlier, supports
the notion of a train that changes with its occupants.
The
implications, if true, escape me. For example, I’ve wondered if perhaps time
itself flows at different speeds in different parts of the train. What if I have
returned to the carriage of my birth, but not recognized it as such? What if
that carriage now lies somewhere in the midst of a desolation through which
I’ve passed? What if, what if, what if.
I
feel old, though my body remains healthy. Only yesterday, I realized that a
single reason has kept me from settling. Continued travel always offered the
promise of something new. But now, after a lifetime of travel, the opposite has
become true. Travel is all I know. It is settling that offers something
different. I am considering shelving my travel journal, and choosing a carriage
to live out my days. The train still begs the same questions, but I doubt we can
access the answers. Reflecting, I’m willing to say a single thing. Wherever
we’re going, whatever you believe, make no mistake. One and all, the train
takes us there together.
