PHILOSOPHY
The Man On The Train Who Dropped Science
It’s not always easy to tell who’s all there and who isn’t
I live in the downtown of a city that likes to think it’s big, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s not. I commute to work out in the suburbs, which takes about an hour each way. It’s a hike, but I don’t mind. In fact, I’ve gotten used to it the past six months.
A significant part of that hour is on a train. I go against the traffic, so it’s relatively empty for the majority of my trek and I always get a seat without difficulty. I spend most of my time reading. I can usually bite off about 30 or 40 pages and before I know it, I’m there.
It heartens me to see more and more people doing the same these days. Actual books. With pages and all. Far more remain glued to their phones, but that’s not for here.
That’s in the morning, going. Coming back in the afternoon, it’s a different story. By the time it gets to my station, the train is full, although usually within about three stops a seat opens up.
It’s just as well, because it takes at least that long to suss out what kind of people you are sharing the space with.
It’s a different set of people than the ones in the morning. Not better, not worse, just different. But often enough, though not always, there is someone aboard who seems to have everyone in the train car on edge, for one reason or another.
Most people have seen enough on their daily journeys by now to know that this is just a part of the modern urban experience. We are in a serious mental health predicament around here and there are people crying out for help, with no means of getting it and sometimes they show up in our midst. Sometimes they bump up on our personal space.
Very few of us know what to do in that situation. Most people stare at their phones, hoping that things will resolve themselves, of themselves, eventually — in other words, the person will get off at the next stop and thereby become someone else’s problem.
Some of them, if they are particularly alarmed, themselves might switch cars at the next stop. It can be a smart move. Occasionally a transit police officer — who’s been alerted to a disturbance — will get on the train and everyone can finally exhale. The authorities have arrived. Crisis averted, everything is going to be fine.
We are told that random violence is on the rise in this city, specifically on public transit. I’m not sure if that’s true or not, but in the vast majority of these situations, it’s my experience that it’s rare that things suddenly make the leap into outright violence.
Sometimes, what transpires is actually quite interesting.
Back to the man to whom I alluded in the title. When I got on the train, he was already deep into a conversation. With himself, as I came to realize.
Not my fault — these days, you can never be sure if someone is indeed talking to themselves, or if by the magic of technology, they are conducting an actual conversation through their smartphone and wireless earbuds.
Not this guy. He was a tall Rasta in construction worker attire, done with work for the day and heading home. One supposes.
He had not a bother on him and was debating with himself about whether time existed or not. And not the kind of barstool philosophy, I just listened to “Dark Side of the Moon” with the lights off again after a huge bong hit, kind of conversation either.
No, this was academic in nature. Elevated, even. He was quoting sources, referring to studies, possibly even delving into scripture.
He was giving pearls to anyone engaged enough to listen up for a minute and not avert their eyes and ears. I wish I had recorded it but I clearly remember phrases like “Time is an illusion, reality is timeless”, “People who believe in physics know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
Thanks to Albert Einstein for those nuggets, as it turns out. But what about “Time doesn’t exist, clocks exist. Time is just an agreed upon construct. While it has its uses, we have been programmed to live our lives by this construct as if it were real.”
One could assume that his day on the construction site, much like mine in a school, is divided up into little parcels of time that don’t exist, but that we all agree to use, so as to organize our day of work. Perhaps this is his way of having a laugh at the mindlessness with which we just accept it.
It was fascinating for many reasons, chief among them was because it was clear that for him, the world around him — in the packed train — also did not exist.
He was talking to himself. And so what.
And just like that, we arrived at his stop. Out the door he and the others went. I got a seat and started reading my book.
But if I see him again this week, I’ll keep my book in my bag and go and stand next to him and see if I can gain some enlightenment, on whatever topic he chooses: The meaning of life, the existence of God, the death of the future…whatever.
Here the follow up article to this, a few months later: