When the Journey Matters Most

I have a love affair with trains. They’re comfortable, relaxing, and civilized. Compared to the cramped claustrophobia of air travel, trains are luxury made tangible. And there’s a certain romantic quality to them. Compare Murder on the Orient Express to “Snakes on a Plane” and you’ll understand what I mean.

San Diego station

Last month I indulged my railway romance to travel from San Diego to Portland—a thousand-mile journey that began with the single step of getting from my apartment to the Amtrak station a mile and a half away. There, at about 6am on a Tuesday, I boarded the commuter train to LA.  

And because I had booked a sleeper compartment for the next leg, I spent a short layover in the first class lounge at Union Station. After about an hour a redcap drove us and our luggage to the platform where the Coast Starlight waited. At 10:10am it pulled out so gently and quietly you might not have known we were moving.

Lounge at Union Station

After stowing luggage in my room I checked out the three trailing cars: parlor car, dining car, and domed observation lounge. I reserved a seat for lunch and dinner (meals, ordered from the menu and served on good china, are included in the ticket price), and sat back to watch the California coastline roll by. The route took us past Mission Santa Barbara, through the wine country of Paso Robles, then on to San Jose and Oakland, stopping there about 10pm.

Sleeper car

Facing seats fold down
to make bed

Dining

Parlor car

Observation car

Mt. Shasta from a postcard (it
was overcast when we passed)

When we passed Sacramento at midnight I was comfortably asleep in my room, but at 5am I saw Mt. Shasta roll by and stayed awake for the rest of the trip to watch the scenery: the high desert of Klamath Falls, the Cascades Range with its many tunnels, and finally north up the Willamette Valley from Eugene. We arrived in Portland about 4pm on Wednesday, just a few minutes behind schedule.

The purpose of this trip was a work-related conference and the weekend with son Scott in his new condo, but the journey mattered as much if not more than the destination. It was an adventure, an odyssey of discovery, something I’ll treasure in memory for many years.

Maya Angelou wrote of love that it “jumps hurdles, leaps fences, [and] penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.” One could say of the love of trains, it traverses valleys, climbs through high deserts, and negotiates tunnels to bring the joy of travel and a more relaxed way of viewing the world. ■

Klamath Lake

A rainbow greets me in Oregon

Whittier, Faulkner and Coleridge Walk Into a Bar

I had lunch with some friends the other day, and one of them stared talking about her past. She wishes things could have been different: a happier childhood, a more caring family, different lovers, better jobs, etc. etc. “What if, what if …” she wondered over and over. “If only this. If only that.” Waaah, waaah, waaah!

I don’t resonate with that attitude, and “poor me” doesn’t cut it, although I didn’t say so outright. Instead, an aphorism from John Greenleaf Whittier came to mind, so I quoted it: “Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’”

This elicited a couple of “oohs” from the group, so after a pause … for dramatic effect, of course … I explained myself, saying something like: “I don’t regret the past, and there’s nothing I can do about it. It makes us who we are. We shouldn’t dwell on it but should learn from our experiences and move on.”

The Whittier quote comes from his poem “Maud Muller” about a beautiful young woman who, while harvesting hay, meets a judge from the nearby town. Each is smitten with the other, and each dreams of marrying and adopting the other’s lifestyle. He dreamed of becoming a gentleman farmer, and she longed to become a rich judge’s wife. In the end, with sublime irony, she marries a simple, uneducated farmer and he marries a woman who loves him only for his money. Both marriages are unhappy, and for the rest of their lives Maud and the judge reflect with remorse on what might have been. 

Whittier writes: “God pity them both! And pity us all / Who vainly the dreams of youth recall.” 

I think Whittier is saying that what makes it might have been the saddest of all words is not merely that Maud’s life could have taken a different turn but that she wastes so much emotional energy brooding over it. Woulda, coulda, shoulda. That’s an emotion even less useful than worry. At least a few of the things we worry about actually do happen. As for the things that might have been: they never did and never will.

I reinforced my point by quoting a line from William Faulkner. He famously wrote that for some people “the past is never dead; it’s not even past.” That is to say, for those people—like for Maud Muller—the past is a burden, old baggage, an albatross around their necks, and they’d be best advised to shed it and move on. [It’s not often that I can work three literary references into one short conversation—the third being the albatross from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner—but that day I did.]

As my cousin Doug Smith writes in his book Happiness: The Art of Living with Peace, Confidence and Joy, “The past is a key to happiness ... because if we don’t resolve feelings about events in our past we can be so absorbed by remorse or anger that we fail to live in the present.”

Or as one might say more succinctly: Get over it!

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I Won't Dance, Don't Ask Me

Kent & Dani

The Hermit Philosopher just got back from his nephew
Kent's wedding. It was the third such event he's attended recently, the other two being son Steve's wedding in September and daughter Sarah's in May. The HP pretends not to like these things much because they interfere with his reclusive lifestyle, but if truth be told all three were moving, joyous and enjoyable occasions.

An Email from God

From:  God [god@heaven.net]

Date:  July 29, 2014 at 8:33:22 AM PDT

To:   Distribution list [all humanity]

Subj: Just stop it!

Reply-To:  [www.prayerstoGod.net]

People, I’m sorry, but I just don’t understand you. And if I don’t understand you, that’s saying a lot. LOL

I created anatomically modern versions of you about 200,000 years ago. I know, I know: some of you take everything literally and believe I did it in October of 4004 BC.  But that’s just part of biblical mythology ... an early kind of PR campaign on My part, don’tcha know. (Sorry. I digress.)

After you muddled on for a few thousand years I let you develop modern human behavior: language, abstract thought, symbolism, etc. That was about 50,000 years ago, and at that point I thought you would develop real intelligence and common sense on your own. I was wrong.

From the moment I let your species loose on this planet—whether on the sixth day of Creation, as it says in that book you wrote about Me, or some date scores of millennia earlier—there has been but one overriding story line: war.  Constant, unrelenting, unforgiving war. It’s fueled by your fears, anger, jealousies, and hatreds. It never solves anything, but you keep doing it. Apparently you hope that the next one will be the last one. It never is.

I think one of you said, and I’m paraphrasing here, “It’s a mark of insanity to keep trying the same thing over and over and expecting to get different results.” Well if that’s true, I’m here to tell you that you’re all insane. You never get different results; everyone loses, but you keep trying. Pardon the italics, but I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this any more.

I have watched you fight it out for aeons (I’m old, I use the old spelling), and the list of conflicts is endless. To name just a few, there’s the Peloponnesian War, the Hundred Years War, various civil wars (that’s an oxymoron if I ever heard one!), World War I (“the war to end all wars”), WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and hundreds of others.

Now the Middle East is ablaze again in Syria and Gaza and Iraq. And you’ve even democratized war so much that it no longer requires an army: a few zealots with a cause can fly like kamikazes into large buildings or shoot down civilian aircraft with shoulder-held rocket launchers.

Wake up, people! It doesn’t make any sense! You fight endlessly. You fight over territory. You fight over power. You fight over tribal jealousies (take the Hutus vs. the Tutsis, for example). All your great religions purport to worship Me and act in My Name, and they all speak of the desire for love and peace, but you even fight about religion! (See, e.g, Christians vs. Muslims; Catholics vs. Protestants; Sunnis vs. Shiites).

William Shakespeare, the best author I ever created, might as well have been referring to war when he wrote: “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

So here’s my message to you humans: JUST STOP IT! Ask your most respected religious and spiritual leaders (no politicians, please, for My sake!) to get together and send this message to the world on my behalf—

High School Daze

A college-era friend called yesterday. He and his family are in So. Cal. on vacation, and he had told me a week or so ago that we might be able to get together. Now that they’ve arrived at their beach rental—in Carpinteria, near Santa Barbara—he realizes that he’s more than 200 miles from San Diego and getting here would require a long slog through LA traffic or 5½ hours on the train. 

After apologies for the change of plans and our agreement to try again some other time, we got to talking about family, mutual friends, what we do for fun, and even high school reunions because this year is the 50th anniversary of our respective graduations. He’s “devilishly curious” to see whether high school friendships will have survived five decades.

Loyal readers of this blog (assuming there are any) may recall that three years ago I briefly mentioned a related phenomenon. In that post of June 8, 2011, I wrote:

It was prom season recently. "Glee" had an entire episode on it, and the NYT had a story about proms for adults, of all things. The headline read, "Second Shot to Have the Best Night of Their Lives." Their best night! Really? … Gag me! I thought proms were stupid when I went to them (credit peer pressure for my going), and I feel even more so now. And proms for adults? Puh-leeze!  

I guess you can sense where I’m headed with this: my friend Bill is going to his reunion, but I couldn’t care less about mine. The adolescent years generally—and high school years in particular—aren’t especially joyous ones for a lot of people. I don’t think you’re even supposed to be happy at that age, so why conjure up those memories? For me the pleasant ones are few and the lasting friendships fewer still. I’ve kept in touch with the handful of my peers I really care about.

Garfield HS, Terre Haute, IN

I’ve never been back to my high school, and it doesn’t even exist any longer. Its reunion will be combined with the reunions of two other schools in town that also have been relegated to the dust bins of history. Thus, were I to attend the joint festivities I wouldn’t recognize most of the people there and would have little in common with any of them. Why would I want to go back to see a bunch of old people I don’t know?

They can “drink a cup of kindness” to the days gone by, but as for me … I’d rather live happily in the present.

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