How I admire writers capable of describing a scene, an act, a moment in such a way that you remember it, even in its minute particulars, years, no, decades later. Here, during the Trans-Siberian train stops, there comes a sound true in every aspect to a momentous sound from the pages of Anna Karenina -- the loud, iron, clanging noise made by railroad workers banging the huge train wheels with heavy metal mallets, walking up & down from one wheel to the next, clang clang clang. In Tolstoy's pages, this took place on frigid winter nights, with snow thickly whirling around these men, who were old & stooped & misshapen & ominous, somehow stepping out of the black forest just at the edge of the station, rather than the station itself. These echoing clangs are a death knell. We all know what happened to Anna.
Fortunately this sound, as I listen to it on similar mysterious snow & ice-bound nights, is not a siren call for me to likewise fling myself under the wheels of the train. But it does evoke my life's history of reading novels, how dear it is to me, giving me worlds beyond my world.
Undercarriage of a Trans-Siberian Railway car
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