Tracks

Once upon a time I lived in a beautiful city full of bookshops. Whenever I could, I would take myself to readings and signings and such, and, whenever I did, the same fanciful idea would float around my dizzy head. I think it had to do with the fact that book-signings are just about the most intimate contact that plebs like me can ever reasonably expect to have with the famous and successful — at least the famous and successful that we have some respect for. It’s not a terribly striking or original idea, but it’s this: what if one could somehow leap into someone else’s life, follow its course rather than one’s own. Imagine two hugely long, perfectly straight railway tracks, one crossing a continent east to west, the other crossing north to south. No matter how big the continent, no matter how different the landscapes each might have traversed, at the point where the lines cross, they’re in some meaningful way the same, for just a moment. Of course, physical proximity has nothing necessarily to do with the existence of alternative paths, or alternative choices. That’s why a train analogy is better than, say, a car or bus analogy: our lives mostly run on tracks, which lack a system of points that might connect our tracks to the tracks of others. We can pass other lives, perhaps close enough to wave, close enough to wonder where their train has been, and where it’s going to, but we then pass by, head off to our own horizon.

This is only really an idea that has any currency when we happen to have some idea about the landscapes that another train has seen, or might see, which is why it was at book-signings that I’d have such thoughts, rather than just walking down a busy street. These were people I knew something about, whose lives had some form of public domain. How strange to be crossing the tracks of other lives that had been to such magical, faraway places. Did the crossing somehow make those places accessible to me, if I just turned and jumped the tracks here, then followed to wherever? I couldn’t help but see rails running off in many directions. I followed my own home, of course.

I think this has been on my mind because I’ve essentially just finished a little web-design project for an academic who, among other things, appears as a talking head on the documentary extras on the new Star Wars DVDs. His tracks have also crossed those of (to my knowledge) François Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock, and probably many more. My Famous Philosopher Friend‘s tracks have crossed those of Winston Churchill, E.M. Forster, Kurt Vonnegut. It makes my head spin. Forgive a moment’s gauche starriness, but those tracks are a very long way from my own, their landscapes full of great peaks and grand vistas.

The moral, I think, is both humbling and inspiring. We’re never so far from each other, the trivial and the great. And, though we must follow our own tracks, we do have power over their path — perhaps if only like Gromit, frantically laying sections in front of the careering locomotive.