To Vienna by train

Felix and Martha are returning to Vienna by train:


Arthur Schnitzler, Dying. 1895. In Desire and Delusion: Three Novellas, trans. Margret Schaefer (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003).

Schnitzler does so much with a handful of details. I like the phrase “into the grey day,” with its suggestion of an observer looking into nearly impenetrable fog. I like the contrast between what‘s seen at close range — the rain, which must be trickling down the window — and things seen at a distance. I like the contrast of speed and stasis — wires dancing by, then the train stopping. I like the way we see — or don’t see — life on the platform from Felix’s perspective. I like the reminder of the noise over which one might try to speak on a train. And I like the way Schnitzler captures the quiet exhaustion that comes with the end of a long trip, even if one isn’t on the verge of death.

Reading this paragraph, I thought how little difference there is between train and plane: water on the window, fog, a landscape now and then emerging, the sense that something is happening up front, or in back, that one cannot see. And, on the way home, quiet exhaustion.

Also from Schnitzler
“Maestro!” : “A simple bourgeois home”

[I cannot read German, but I know how to figure things out. The details of this translation that I like appear to be in the German text. Search for “Er starrte durch die geschlossenen Fensterscheiben” to find this passage.]