The Silence of the Grave

Working from home today only makes my questions about riding on public transportation more insistent. Here I am, in my pajamas, with no need to commute, and I feel like I am having El flashbacks. Only without the benefit of having had an enjoyable drug experience to flashback to.

Here's the thing about the train: it makes people evil. And I don't just mean other people, I mean me as well. When I am walking down the street or interacting with people in my office I make a conscious effort to be reasonable, if not in fact kind. I make way for those who are passing, I chat with people, I smile and attempt to be accommodating when it's appropriate.

Commuting, however, turns people into altogether different animals. I'm not sure why - we're all going to work, which is not a place most people want to be anyhow. And yet, any sign that an outside body is going to slow you down on the way (crowding the train, getting in your way, or, as an alternate example, driving just below the speed limit on the freeway) seems to makes ones personality boil all the way over. Once, on the train, a woman roughly pushed me out of the place I had been standing for ten minutes as we mutually tried to exit the train, then turned to me and said, between her teeth, "ExCUSE you!" Of course, she could just have been a jerk*, but it's difficult to know for sure.

The El is almost always quiet in the morning, and quite often in the evening: it's a lull broken only by exhuberant children, mysteriously reunited friends (I've seen this more than once, and they always talk loud), and cell phone conversations. Perhaps this is what allows us to encase ourselves in self-interest: a pact seems to exist between riders of the train, refusing to acknowledge that the time spent in transit is real, agreeing that we are not really interacting with one another. And so, when one person's self-interest rubs up against another (as when, for example, two people standing equidistant from a newly open seat must fight silently to claim it), the experience is highly abrasive. Not only are we forced to remember that other people exist, we are also forced to accept the fact that they are having none of your train-induced solipsism.

I just read a story by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky which addresses this anxiety perfectly: a scientist answers a call for the development of new fuels by harnessing the power of people's ill-will. While testing the product, the city government disconnects a train car - which is outfitted with a sort of malice-converter - from its locomotion, smack dab in the middle of morning rush hour. As the commuters onboard grow more and more malevolently impatient, the car begins to chug along.

I really don't like how much spite I feel towards strangers on the El. They bump into me, they take my seat (which could, arguably, just be called "a" seat), and I begin to honestly believe that they are stupid and cruel people. Hatred manifests. I do make an effort to take a deep breath and remember what I fool I'm being, but it disturbs me how little control I have over my emotions in these situations.

And so I like the deadly silence of the train, but I don't really trust it, and I don't understand it.





*Like the elephant "Stampy" in the Simpson's episode 'Bart Gets an Elephant.' Doesn't everyone remember that? Isn't anyone else's life composed mostly of inappropriately prevalent recollections of Simpson's episodes and Calvin and Hobbes cartoons?