Reading on the train
Apr. 30th, 2005 11:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vaneramosThere’s something romantic about the strange, headlong, rollicking motion of a train. You’re tearing across open farmland, and it feels like one slight jolt might shake your mind off the wave of inertia and leave it irretrievably behind, wandering through nameless wheat fields, or along a small, forsaken rural boarding platform where only ghosts await passage.
Along the line from Windsor to London yesterday, woodlands came crowding over the landscape to meet the train, bearing the first lusty chartreuse blush of life. Wild cherries in bridal white skittered like startled virgins beyond the uplifted interstices of dark-branched panes. Then the car would burst into open landscape again, where countless red-winged blackbirds mounted from fence rails, dark cherubim heralding the return of passion and property. Their lusty cries echoed out of memory through the sliding, shuddering window.
I was reading The Picture of Dorian Gray, but felt my attention divided between page and passage, afraid that I might lose a thread of meaning from either story. Or perhaps, with the crowd of images passing my eyes, take either one too seriously. Wilde barrages the mind with wisdom and delusions of wisdom. One must remain vigilant to the vernal bloom of irony.
Along the line from Windsor to London yesterday, woodlands came crowding over the landscape to meet the train, bearing the first lusty chartreuse blush of life. Wild cherries in bridal white skittered like startled virgins beyond the uplifted interstices of dark-branched panes. Then the car would burst into open landscape again, where countless red-winged blackbirds mounted from fence rails, dark cherubim heralding the return of passion and property. Their lusty cries echoed out of memory through the sliding, shuddering window.
I was reading The Picture of Dorian Gray, but felt my attention divided between page and passage, afraid that I might lose a thread of meaning from either story. Or perhaps, with the crowd of images passing my eyes, take either one too seriously. Wilde barrages the mind with wisdom and delusions of wisdom. One must remain vigilant to the vernal bloom of irony.
