Citizen Blair

He lifted his eyes from the newspaper - fatigued by the continuing effort to take it in - and viewed the countryside passing by. The landscape had changed distinctly since he had last looked and now with it more like he imagined it should be after so long in travelling, he resolved to finish reading for the rest of the journey. And as the visual sense flooded his brain, he became aware also of other feelings, scents and sounds which broke away from this other world and making their way through the open window, called to him with buccolic abandon. He realised that he was happier than he had been for some years and in that instant of realising, he forgot the toils and troubles of the world brought to him through the journal, now on the seat at his side and looked forward for the first time in as long. The breeze blowing in gently, carried on it the gentle tang of greenery mixed in with the rusty, oily smells of the locomotive just ahead and all this seemed a drug of forgetting, of not regretting, a reverse truth serum, designed to blot out the reality of other people's lives and to leave one feeling clean and happy.

But above all, it was the knowledge that this line led him home, back from the toil of leaving school and college, the Alice-in-Wonderland racing with the world standing still all around him, the meaningless rush to make money just to eat and sleep safely when all about the nation prospered on the back of the toil of the countless millions just like him. It was not fair he thought. It was obvious to him that the cleverest people he knew were not those in control of this mad rush; they were those who appealed to tradition as the reason for all this paradoxical, chaotic activity, those who could not believe the world should change because their own view left no room for anything other than their own ideas of correctness. His friends knew the way to a better world and yet coloured by their own desire for comfort and safety, they stayed safe beneath the parapet, wanting only the plush chair the good food that came to them at the end of the day, not wanting to think about those who slept on hard ground and ate irregularly and without enjoyment.

All this was why he had given up on it, realising over time, through so many crises which at first threatened to overwhelm him, that nothing bad ever really happened. Screaming in the night gives no comfort to the tormented and the depressed and the raging that came with his own flurries of instability had not helped him in any way. Life, he thought paradoxically, was in one's own hand and also the result of pure luck, the bouncing of particles at levels that no human would ever see directly. Whatever he did or did not do was of no consequence and so he might as well enjoy himself in the place where he had been happiest. And so he gave it all up, left the city and came home to start up again where all the happiness had ended.

No cry in the distance made its way into the carriage, no vision of pain and assault met his eye for the view was one of green and rough edges, the battle of the world against the human met in the continuous toil of the sparse population. But this was a happy toil he thought in his vision of rural perfection. He would be back to nature, not worrying about the harder edges of his working life up to now. He would be happy. He would be happy.