Revelation on a Steam Train

I said, “Can we open the window?”

Sotto voce, Mum said, “The others probably want it closed.”

It was the early 1960s. I was eight or nine and traveling with my family to England’s south coast in a steam train’s eight-passenger compartment. The other four passengers were strangers.

I wanted to protest, but doing so in a public place would have made Mum cross.

Another part of the memory returns to me. With the window at my right, I was prepared to open it myself, not trying to get someone else to do it. But if I’d done so without asking permission, Dad would have snapped at me, even scarier than Mum’s disapproval.

I eased back, watching steam trace a gray-white line over the fields and villages outside the window and ruminated. Why should I, someone who wanted something, yield to others who apparently did not? I came to the conclusion that in order for me to get what I wanted, I had to act. Anyone who wanted the window closed didn’t have to do a thing. Despite feeling frustrated, I was pleased to have come up with what felt like a clever insight.

That was my last ride on a steam train. Today, I romanticize those locomotives’ puffs of steam, audible as excited breathing and visible as smoke, and their plaintive horn blasts through a forlorn night. Trains used to have that effect on people. Witness the allure of Alfred Hitchcock’s film title, Strangers on a Train. True, to indulge such nostalgia, I must consciously overlook the pollution those locomotives cast into the atmosphere.

I’m just as selectively nostalgic about my train compartment revelation. In retrospect, there were good reasons against opening the window. The steam flowing by us could have invaded our compartment and the noise level risen. Even so, I suspect my idea about acting and not acting influenced me as the years went by.

Those of us fortunate enough to have grown up barely touched by social conflict tend to look back at the time of our childhood as more orderly and peaceful. Usually, I see myself as like those strangers in the train—as never taking any action that could meet opposition. In fact, I eventually stood up for myself in ways that felt traumatic at the time but that I look back on with pride. Two or three years after that train ride, I ran away from a boarding school and deliberately failed a crucial exam in order to get thrown out of that school. It worked. Such acts of resistance convinced my parents and authorities to listen to me.

Of course, there have been times when the right thing was to be as silent as those strangers. Why get into an argument that accomplishes nothing but antagonizes everyone? Actions that could imperil one’s job, a friendship or a close associate must be weighed with care. Deciding not to act is itself an act. It may well explain the seeming passivity of the people in that train compartment. In fact, one could argue that my revelation was based on false premise after false premise.

Nevertheless, I still see it as a revelation. I fall into the camp of those who say they’d rather regret the things they did than regret those they didn’t. Passivity leads to unconsidered consequences. Making and acting on decisions continually defines and redefines us if we choose to make the never-ending journey toward self-knowledge.