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“Shall we go in?” she asked.
“We shall in a minute. Let me follow a train of thought.”
I thought. More than a minute passed.
“All right. Come on.”
“Was I on that train?”
“You certainly were.”

—Lolita


Consider this journal a view of the tracks on which rumbles and halts and very occasionally glides my train of associative thought. You will not see here the entirety of the industrial age entourage, but instead steal swift glimpses, through the leafy arms of elm and poplar and the hazy city that skylines your view, of one car or another. At times the broad side of a cargo car might appear, its fluttering tarp revealing the unsorted coal or lumber imported from a dream. Another time the locomotive itself might barrel toward you, threatening—even from the distant hill upon which you’ve tentatively perched—to flatten your sensibility with its roaring insistence. And then, from day to day, a dining car may pass, and through its smudged windows you may spy one moment of one course of a first-class meal not yet digested but held with gleaming fork and sliced into with serrated knife. You’ll see the sleeping car, the panes of its darkened windows scarcely visible from your hill; and perhaps you’ll startle at the single light that suddenly colors the last berth as the car is pulled away. A peek into the occasional passenger car may please your more voyeuristic tendencies, one eyebrow rising, a sharp inhalation of cold air, as the woman in the pillbox hat recrosses her shapely legs and the gentleman across the aisle clutches his newspaper more firmly, as a runnel of saliva slowly trickles from the damp corner of a drowsing magistrate’s slack lips, as a child spells unknown words backwards in the glazed window of a cold morning, and a primly dressed bas bleu presses the short nails of her small hand against the tweed suited shoulder of the seated professor she passes along the narrow aisle. It is, however, doubtful that you’ll see the caboose.

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