On a Train

In a passage of an old book, I read about an encounter between a monk and Dostoevsky on a train. The two men had been seated together in the same section of the train on seats facing each other. In the book, the monk described Dostoevsky’s distracted demeanor and the preoccupied way that he nodded to the porter, never looking up from the papers that he was leafing through in his lap. He made a note of the way Dostoevsky's hand shook when the train unexpectedly lurched into motion and the way that the writer reached for a steady grip on the armrest of his seat. He said that once the train was clear of the city and rumbling along the open tracks, Dostoevsky finally looked up from his papers and glanced at the countryside passing out the window and blinked and squinted his eyes like someone who had just spent hours upon hours in a dark room, and it was only then that he heard him mutter a clipped sigh of relief.

As the miles and the hours went by, the two men engaged in a few halting moments of conversation that never went beyond a few awkward words or sentences, that never gained the momentum of the train carrying them along, conversations that died as quickly and as lifelessly as they began. The monk was eager to tell Dostoevsky that he recognized him. He wanted to tell him that he had read his books and he wanted to share his thoughts on them. But there never seemed to be a good place to inject this into the conversation, and every time they spoke and fell back into silence, it became harder and harder to bring it up. And the monk thought of all the reasons not to bring it up. He considered that Dostoevsky had no great reason to be impressed by the recognition; he was with himself everywhere that he went on Earth, and moreover, he was probably used to being recognized and being told that he was recognized and pestered with people's thoughts about his writing.

So the monk never brought it up. When the train reached the station, the two men traded a perfunctory handshake and grabbed their bags and went their ways. They got tangled up in the crowd out on the platform and separated from one another. But the monk spotted Dostoevsky a short while later. He saw him walking alone down a narrow passageway between the buildings. It was quiet there, away from the crowds, and there were puddles on the stones, and from some lonely place high above, the afternoon light shone down on the writer as he stopped and set down his trunk on the pavement and gathered the papers he had been working on into a neat sheaf and popped the latches on the trunk and set the stack of papers gently on top of the folded clothes inside and continued on his way. The monk knew that he would never see the man again, and he wished with all his heart that he would have told him that he knew who he was, that he would have pushed past the awkwardness and told him all the things he would never have the chance to say again. He decided then to pray for Dostoevsky, to fervently hope that he would find peace from the preoccupations and obsessions that seemed to be consuming him.

After I had finished reading this anecdote, I noticed a that there was a footnote at the bottom of the page that provided a date for this encounter, and I realized that it was only two days before Dostoevsky finished work on his novel The Possessed. I went to my bookshelf to grab one of my copies of the book. As I opened it up, I saw that the type on the pages had faded to the point that it was completely unreadable. There were a few places where the ink had been stamped heavy and I could still make out the letters, but the rest of the text looked like it was in the process of fading back into the page itself, receding into the weathered depths of the paper. It was as though the book had been left out in the sunlight and all the words had been bleached away in its sublime bliss. I had other copies of the book, but I was afraid to check them to see if they were in the same condition.