the train will always pass you by

Disclaimer: extraordinarily rambly and somewhat offtopic review. I hope I am not offending Polish and/or European and/or non-European people with this review!

I'm from the US and have never been to Poland. There's a part of me that badly wants to travel to Poland, or to another European country, or to any other country really. For a long time I've been fascinated by how people in different countries live. I'd love to see every country in the world before I die, though that's an unrealistic and prohibitively expensive goal, dangerous depending on the country, and probably not worth it, since traveling to a place is hardly the same as living there. Visiting an area as a tourist who doesn't understand the language is the opposite of being a local. The real shame is that just by being born in a certain place, you're locked out of the vast majority of the world, and you'll never be able to really communicate with the majority of humans who only speak languages you'll never be fluent in.

Anyway. To a loser American like me, Poland and other European countries have a certain sophisticated aura... of history, of rich culture and tradition, of bygone medieval kingdoms and such... not to mention the history of Poland itself, which has gone through periods of subsumption by various empires before arising yet again like a glorious phoenix from death and alright these previous sentences are laying it on thick, so I will add that I may or may not have gone through a "countryball" phase in school and this may or may not be relevant. (Don't search up "countryball" if you value your opinion of what "the kids these days" are doing with their free time.)

Also I will add that I know every country does all kinds of heinous things. And that Europe gets to be known as a mystical land of sophistication in part due to the legacy of European colonialism. (British colonialism is why I'm even writing this post in English, if you think about the history of the US.) And that people in other countries are just people and there's nothing particularly special about them at the end of the day just because they exist somewhere. And that every place has problems and we shouldn't put any particular country on a pedestal, or glorify what shouldn't be glorified. I probably don't get out enough, and should touch grass and stop fantasizing about international travel. I probably won't.

Since travel costs too much time and money, is reading a story from someone who lives in a certain country a substitute for traveling there? Can it provide you with the experience of really being a local? I've never been to Poland, but reading this story felt like being there, if only for a few short minutes. We have trains where I live in the US, too, which aren't so different from Polish trains. I think. Tracks going off into the fog, mournful calls in the night and all that. But at the same time, there's an extra level of mystique for me because these are Polish trains. Inheritors of Polish history, imbued with that Polish "aura"... If I saw them, would they have Polish text on the sides? And the people within would talk in Polish about Polish problems, as they travel to and from faraway cities I'll never touch in my lifetime, etc...

For me, stories about life in other countries are fun because they can teach you about places you've never been and never will go to. Particularly if these are countries you might never visit, particularly if these stories focus on history, culture, politics, and all the things that make up a different society. This story is about the specific experience of being stuck in rural Poland during Covid, and has details specific to that. Musings on the difference between village life and city life, and how rural hometowns (home villages in this case, I guess) can suck you in until you find it difficult to return and are relegated to watching the trains pass you by, thinking about the life you could've had. Nothing I've ever experienced or will experience, though I've heard of how isolated North American hometowns can trap people, and reading about the Polish equivalent fascinates me. This was a pattern for me with this short story: seeing details that remind me of things I've seen in the US, but more alluring because they're Polish. How much of this is myself projecting my own deranged European obsession onto the story, I don't know. There's also a detail highly specific to Poland, made all the more special because the previous details could be generalized to rural railroads internationally but this is highly localized: a mention of "decaying farming machines that remember Soviet Union". For obvious reasons, we don't have Soviet farming machines in the US. The combination of familiar and unfamiliar things is breathtaking. It evoked for me the feeling of international travel, the strange wonderousness of seeing things almost but not quite familiar. Seeing the great unity and diversity of humanity (insert spiel about the beauty of humanity here). I want to go to Poland and see the old Soviet remnants. I want to travel to places that have been touched by a different kind of history. I'm fantasizing about international travel again.

One last note: There are a few "Polish-isms" in this writing that are really charming to me, like omitting "the" before "Soviet Union". As one of those US citizens who are so commonly mocked for only being able to write in one language, I have great admiration and respect for the author who can write in English, presumably Polish, and possibly even more.