Essays &notes worth keeping

For eleven years I took the same train, and for ten of them I did not look out of the window. I had a laptop, a deadline and a theory that time in motion was time that could be reclaimed. The country between the two cities was something that happened behind my own reflection.

1 The line runs through four tunnels. The second is the long one; your ears notice before you do.

Then, one February, the battery died somewhere past the second tunnel and I was left with the glass. I remember being almost embarrassed, the way you are embarrassed by a silence at dinner. A field. A row of poplars. A man burning leaves at the end of a garden, who lifted a hand as if he knew someone on board.

2 Poplars were planted along the old field boundaries. Most of them are older than the railway.

Nobody had told me that the view was the work.

I have since learned the forty minutes the way you learn a piece of music: the cutting where the light drops, the river that appears twice because the line bends back on itself, the level crossing where a dog is always waiting, though it cannot always be the same dog. None of it is useful. All of it is mine.

3 A reader wrote to say the dog is called Brás and belongs to the crossing keeper. We have not checked.