diminished commitment of the staff all contributed to my disenchantment—and the experience of travel by train in the US was hardly calculated to restore one’s memories or enthusiasms. Meanwhile the publicly owned state railways of continental Europe entered a halcyon era of investment and technical innovation, while largely preserving the distinctive qualities inherited from earlier networks and systems.
Thus to travel in Switzerland is to understand the ways in which efficiency and tradition can seamlessly blend to social advantage. Paris’s Gare de l’Est or Milano Centrale, no less than Zurich’s Hauptbahnhof and Budapest’s Keleti Pályaudvar, stand as monuments to nineteenth-century town planning and functional architecture: compare the long-term prospects of New York’s inglorious Pennsylvania Station—or virtually any modern airport. At their best—from St. Pancras to Berlin’s remarkable new central station—railway stations are the very incarnation of modern life, which is why they last so long and still perform so very well the tasks for which they were first designed. As I think back on it— toutes proportions gardées Waterloo did for me what country churches and Baroque cathedrals did for so many poets and artists: it inspired me. And why not? Were not the great glass-and-metal Victorian stations the cathedrals of the age?
I had long planned to write about trains. I suppose in a way I have already done so, at least in part. If there is something distinctive about my version of contemporary European history in Postwar , it is—I believe—the subliminal emphasis on space: a sense of regions, distances, differences, and contrasts within the limited frame of one small subcontinent. I think I came to that sense of space by staring aimlessly out of train windows and inspecting rather more closely the contrasting sights and sounds of the stations where I alighted. My Europe is measured in train time. The easiest way for me to “think” Austria or Belgium is by meandering around the Westbahnhof or the Gare du Midi and reflecting on the experience, not to mention the distances between. This is certainly not the only way to come to grips with a society and a culture, but it works for me.
Perhaps the most dispiriting consequence of my present disease—more depressing even than its practical, daily manifestations—is the awareness that I shall never again ride the rails. This knowledge weighs on me like a leaden blanket, pressing me ever deeper into that gloom-laden sense of an ending that marks the truly terminal disease: the understanding that some things will never be. This absence is more than just the loss of a pleasure, the deprivation of freedom, much less the exclusion of new experiences. Remembering Rilke, it constitutes the very loss of myself—or at least, that better part of myself that most readily found contentment and peace. No more Waterloo, no more rural country halts, no more solitude: no more becoming, just interminable being.
IX
The Lord Warden
W e are all Europeans now. The English travel throughout continental Europe, and the UK is a leading tourist destination as well as a magnet for job seekers from Poland to Portugal. Today’s travelers don’t think twice before boarding a plane or a train, alighting shortly after in Brussels, Budapest, or Barcelona. True, one European in three never leaves home; but everyone else makes up for them with insouciant ease. Even the (internal) frontiers have melted away: it can be a while before you realize you have entered another country.
It wasn’t always thus. In my London childhood, “Europe” was somewhere you went on exotic foreign vacations. The “Continent” was an alien place—I learned far more about New Zealand or India, whose imperial geography was taught in every elementary school. Most people never ventured abroad: vacations were taken at windswept English coastal resorts or in cheery domestic holiday camps. But
Thus to travel in Switzerland is to understand the ways in which efficiency and tradition can seamlessly blend to social advantage. Paris’s Gare de l’Est or Milano Centrale, no less than Zurich’s Hauptbahnhof and Budapest’s Keleti Pályaudvar, stand as monuments to nineteenth-century town planning and functional architecture: compare the long-term prospects of New York’s inglorious Pennsylvania Station—or virtually any modern airport. At their best—from St. Pancras to Berlin’s remarkable new central station—railway stations are the very incarnation of modern life, which is why they last so long and still perform so very well the tasks for which they were first designed. As I think back on it— toutes proportions gardées Waterloo did for me what country churches and Baroque cathedrals did for so many poets and artists: it inspired me. And why not? Were not the great glass-and-metal Victorian stations the cathedrals of the age?
I had long planned to write about trains. I suppose in a way I have already done so, at least in part. If there is something distinctive about my version of contemporary European history in Postwar , it is—I believe—the subliminal emphasis on space: a sense of regions, distances, differences, and contrasts within the limited frame of one small subcontinent. I think I came to that sense of space by staring aimlessly out of train windows and inspecting rather more closely the contrasting sights and sounds of the stations where I alighted. My Europe is measured in train time. The easiest way for me to “think” Austria or Belgium is by meandering around the Westbahnhof or the Gare du Midi and reflecting on the experience, not to mention the distances between. This is certainly not the only way to come to grips with a society and a culture, but it works for me.
Perhaps the most dispiriting consequence of my present disease—more depressing even than its practical, daily manifestations—is the awareness that I shall never again ride the rails. This knowledge weighs on me like a leaden blanket, pressing me ever deeper into that gloom-laden sense of an ending that marks the truly terminal disease: the understanding that some things will never be. This absence is more than just the loss of a pleasure, the deprivation of freedom, much less the exclusion of new experiences. Remembering Rilke, it constitutes the very loss of myself—or at least, that better part of myself that most readily found contentment and peace. No more Waterloo, no more rural country halts, no more solitude: no more becoming, just interminable being.
IX
The Lord Warden
W e are all Europeans now. The English travel throughout continental Europe, and the UK is a leading tourist destination as well as a magnet for job seekers from Poland to Portugal. Today’s travelers don’t think twice before boarding a plane or a train, alighting shortly after in Brussels, Budapest, or Barcelona. True, one European in three never leaves home; but everyone else makes up for them with insouciant ease. Even the (internal) frontiers have melted away: it can be a while before you realize you have entered another country.
It wasn’t always thus. In my London childhood, “Europe” was somewhere you went on exotic foreign vacations. The “Continent” was an alien place—I learned far more about New Zealand or India, whose imperial geography was taught in every elementary school. Most people never ventured abroad: vacations were taken at windswept English coastal resorts or in cheery domestic holiday camps. But
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