On the travel time of trains

By Lida Pawliuk

A train leaves the station – On a parallel track, a second train leaves the station – A train is delayed forty-five minutes, then eighty – There is no firmness of arrival – Faint rain starts to fall beyond the edge of the platform’s cover – Then: catapulting backwards on the I.C.E. at 250 km/h – Offenburg – The side of another train blurs past, blown out by light white –Afterwards, a slower regional train through the Schwarzwald at sundown, during which looking out a window takes on the moving cinema of the landscape – One’s own reflection, the mirror of the opposite window and movements across the aisle – Three transparent layers interposed with slight colour variations – Residue still marks the place – The strangeness resides in the sense of rapidly progressing through a scene rendered only to a snapshot glimpse – It proceeds in quiet stillness as the train cuts through – [A.] observes that my eyes move as if I am reading the horizon like a text.