Railway Station

".... In a railway station the impersonal and the intimate co-exist. Destinies are played out. The trains run regularly, according to printed timetables. The lines are inexorable. But for each passenger or for each person who comes to meet or see off a traveler, the train in question has its own portent. The portents can be read close-up, in faces, in details of luggage, in the welcomes and partings as people embrace on the platform.

On that late spring afternoon, few people had come. I was the only one to climb the railings and there, clinging on with one arm, to wait for the train to draw in. In the coaches which passed me, I saw people crowding round the doors, impatient to jump down.

Among the first were some Spaniards, relatives of migrant workers already installed in the city. Their small children, deposited on the platform, looked less bemused than their parents, as if for the children one city was much the same as another, equally familiar and equally unknowable. From a rear coach a man with two Alsatian dogs clambered down. The locomotive, now uncoupled, was driven off, leaving the train stranded.

At that moment I saw you at the end of the platform. You were wearing trousers. On the long platform beside the stranded train, in the vast white diffused late-afternoon light of the rift valley, you looked very small. With your appearance everything changed. Everything from the passage under the railway tracks to the sun setting, from the Arabic numerals on the board which announced the times of the trains, to the gulls perched on a roof, from the invisible stars to the taste of coffee on my palate. The world of circumstance and contingency, into which, long before, I had been born, became like a room.

I was home."

John Berger 'And our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos '