067: typing on a train to berlin

existential feelings, chat groups and friend groups, missed opportunities, typing on a train to Berlin + T.S. Eliot

I am typing on a train to Berlin.

I am typing on a train to Berlin, but it might as well be anywhere because I am looking down at my laptop and listening to the same five Taylor Swift songs that I have been listening to on repeat for the whole time I’ve been traveling—the same five songs on ferries, on cobblestone streets, in train stations, morning and evening. I don’t really hear them anymore, but they set my mood and settle my thinking.

I’m facing west, which is away from the direction of the train, which I don’t usually like, but when I look up, I realize that it means I can see the sunset. Earlier it was raining, but now the last light is streaming through the clouds, flashing gold across elongated fields.

The flatness of western Europe is strange to me, accustomed as I am to the softly rolling hills of New England and the steepness of the Rocky Mountains. The fields are wide, flat and cultivated—inscribed by canals and tidy rows of trees.

With the motion of the train, the scene changes. I see fields of mud, and bridges torn by bomb blasts. I see lines of soldiers and armored vehicles. I think of trench rot and mustard gas and barbed wire. Time passes. I think of blitzkrieg. And of cattle cars.

I think of the person whom I desperately wish was with me.

There are always ghosts and echoes when I travel

The last raindrops skitter across my window as the fields fly by. The light fades. The opening bars of Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero” start to play again. I go back to my typing.

Nothing online is true anymore. Have you noticed this?

I came of age at the height of deconstruction in literary criticism; I haven’t seen a piece of writing as anything other than the start of a long series of questions since I was 18.

When you study literature, you learn how to deconstruct bias in texts, only it’s not called bias, it’s called things like connotation and framing and rhetorical fallacies. It’s the difference between describing someone as a plucky second amendment advocate and a gun-toting dipshit. Or the difference between saying that a political party has had a good election result because they lost fewer seats than was widely expected, versus saying that a political party has just lost control of half of the legislative branch.

This is my superpower. I used it with Covid research. I used it with the many and various accusations against Donald Trump (and Hunter Biden). I used it to figure out how to buy and fix up a house.

It’s more and more difficult to do this. The writing forms are too simplified and the layers of meaning are too complicated and there are no more schools of thought, there are only memes, and memes about memes.

There is sarcasm on sarcasm. There is idiom and slang that propagate and re-propagate in days and weeks instead of months and years. Shorthand has been shortened to the length of a quote-tweet. Sources I formerly considered mostly trustworthy are not asking hard questions—or any questions. Sources I don’t consider trustworthy sometimes accidentally back themselves into something resembling reason.

A friend sends me real-life headlines, rewritten by AI so as to change the framing to the negative (or positive, you choose) point of view.

They are letter perfect. They are not the words that I want to get from him.