The Lord of the Station has two faces, which are directed towards departures and arrivals, respectively. Often newcomers ask how the faces can be two when arrivals and departures point, from his office high above the concourse, in the same direction towards the platforms; thus proving they really aren’t good for anything and that the standard of critical thinking in our schools and universities has degraded irreversibly in recent years, because it’s quite clear to anyone who thinks about it for even a second that an arrival and a departure are two very different things.
Let us observe from the Lord’s office - if he doesn’t mind us taking up some space by the window as he works, we’ll have to be quiet - and pick some examples to illustrate this point. There’s a woman in a long cream coat, looks like a veritable caffe latte. See how she stands? Shifts her balance, looks about, furrows her espresso-sharp brow. It’s obvious to even the most casual observer that she awaits an arrival. A departure she’d be focussed, eyeing the timetable, the trains pulling in, with single-mindedness. Instead she’s dispersed all about the place, her gaze wanders from door to door.
Soon, surely, it will happen - there! Like a flash she is gathered, she arrives. Watch her greet this young man with the heavy bag, hug him a little too tightly. Her son? Maybe, but they don’t look alike. A stepmother - you’re getting closer. She is in fact his godmother, but his mother died and the man he used to call his father is no longer in his life. So today as he returns from the heart-engineers’ college back bent double with dirty laundry and illegible course notes, she is the only person he’s looking for, big sister and sensei both.
How do I know all this? I am the station CCTV. I have many eyes and I know how to use them.
Soon they will go back to her apartment where she has made up the sofa bed, and eat takeaway bhaji while he tells her about what he has learned over the last term until late into the night. That’s not important, though. What’s important is you saw the arrival.
Now, let us contrast this arrival with a departure, which will be instructive. See the man who sits sipping an Earl Grey at a flimsy round cafe table beneath the Great Clock. Can you guess where he is going? I don’t know, for he doesn’t either. His briefcase and well-combed hair give an impression of purpose and professional intent, which is why he wears them that way, but it’s just that: an impression. Look a bit closer. His tea has gone cold but still he sips, only a very little at a time, sometimes without his lips even touching the liquid. The hand that holds the cup moves mechanically up and down; the eyes flit about and defocus.
This man is in mourning, you see. His husband has just died. It’s very sad! I watched them carry his coffin through the station the day before yesterday, wheeling it gently upon a trolley as though not to wake him, on his way to his hometown where he’ll be buried in the family plot. His husband, our widower, stood alone at a private ceremony in the city; he will not go to the funeral, for the dead man’s family never approved, and would probably blame him for his death.
I can see you’re restless, but don’t be. This sort of thing happens all the time: micro-tragedies, small devastations. Resist the urge to step forward and comfort him; it’s more respectful to leave him alone in his grief. He has earned it with years of devotion.
So the departure: do you see it? Not the corpse, that is. Death is of course a departure, but of another kind, a less social kind. Death is only personal, and owes nothing to other people. I might have watched the coffin go by but it’s not my job to observe the dead; if it was, I’d have difficulty seeing the living at all through all the noise, for the world is full of ghosts. No, the departure I meant is that of our Earl Grey drinker. He is in the middle of departing from the life he is used to for a life shrouded in cloud, where the outlines of things are hazy and unfamiliar. He has come to the station for reasons that he doesn’t fully understand, which you might crudely characterise as “wanderlust” but that’s not really it, it’s more melancholy than that. Soon he will stand, leave his half-emptied cup behind and board a train, surrounded by strangers, to a destination upon which he has not yet decided. His future is suspended in an intermediate state; for those of you of a mathematical disposition, he is in a quantum superposition of a great many states, some more likely than others, but none yet decided.
What conclusions might we draw from this study? One logical but obviously wrong conclusion might be that a departure is a time of sadness but an arrival is a time of joy. Rubbish! Consider as a counterexample the arrival of an inmate in a prison, or the Jews as they departed from the land of Egypt. Joy and sadness are consequences of the departure or arrival, along with a great many other things, so to call them intertwined is at best bad methodology. It is our task as observers to disentangle the intertwined and to draw out the underlying relationships between things.
You don’t seem to see what I’m getting at, so perhaps it’s time for us to observe a final passer-through on the station concourse below us. This is someone who’s about to get off the 16:35 on platform five, which is just pulling to a halt. The doors slide open and a flood of people alight. Don’t worry - the people in the front are the regulars who hurry to get up first to hurry onwards to their hurried lives. They’re not really departing or arriving, they’re just staying in the same place. So you haven’t missed the person we are looking for, she’ll be waiting a little behind the first wave.
And bang on time - there she is! The young woman with the big backpack who is looking about with wide eyes. Where she’s from they write with a different alphabet, so right now she is overwhelmed with letters, clogging her visual field, vying for attention, each promising perhaps this will be the one that will tell her where she needs to go next.
In that backpack is everything she owns in the world. Namely: another shirt, another pair of socks, some more underwear and menstrual items; an identification document that thus far has caused more problems than it has solved; a blanket that her mother made when she was very small; a toothbrush, toothpaste and a comb; money; two books (to tell you which ones would be an unforgivable invasion of privacy); and various small items of value such as jewellery and electronics which were snatched in a rush in the hope they might be sellable.
As you may have guessed from the letters and the backpack, this woman left her home recently, and although the future is something even I cannot see I know that she will never return. The circumstances of her departure are traumatic, but they are behind her now. Far more interesting is what comes next. Perhaps she will find what she is looking for. Watch her pore over the departures board looking for her connection. Or perhaps she will take a wrong turn, board the wrong train and end up somewhere unexpected. Does she have someone waiting for her? This country, which you and I find familiar, is rich and strange through her eyes.
The question stands: is she departing or arriving?
I can see the Lord of the Station will need us to leave soon, so he can continue his work in peace. He’s humoured us so far by letting us look down upon the little people passing by, so be sure to thank him, and he’ll wear a wry smile on one face as he watches you go.