Notes from an overnight train

There is a specific quality to time on a train that does not exist anywhere else. The world outside moves at the pace of a landscape painting. Inside, the hours are elastic — one hour reading can feel like five minutes; five minutes staring out the window can feel like a short life.

I took the overnight from Berlin to Vienna in January. The kind of crossing that, in another era, would have felt like an event. It still does, a little. You carry a small bag, you eat a bad sandwich from a cart, you wake up at 5am to a field of snow you do not recognise, and you feel, briefly, that the world is larger than your regular life has led you to believe.