A Tram Ride Through Winter
By Krisztian Kos
Habit mixes words and images together until it detaches them from the world. After growing up with them and using them for so many years, by the time we come to know what language is, it has ceased describing the world we grew up in. Hearing and seeing them from day to day, from week to week, no one tries to understand them anymore. However, this is not due to a laziness on our part. Rather, it’s that no one can understand them anymore. We live within the function of language, naming and labelling everything new that we encounter. And one can’t step outside their own history to then look back on it. We are always going to be a part of our own history – in the case of language, a written history. Language eventually swallows up everything around us. We agree on some common icons, and live confined to their realm, almost untouched by reality.
We then lead our lives in this language dictated to us. Over and over, we wake up, breathe, talk, learn, and finally to cease the monotony of waking life, we sleep. We know night will come, but its silence and heaviness are hard to conceive of during the day. The morning’s cold air stings our cheeks, the sun reaches its highest point above us, the sky then turns orange, and night soon settles. At this point, we abandon the life we lead and enter a place no one has ever consciously explored before. We go into this unknown every single day, just to emerge from it the next morning without a memory to claim as our own. Back to our life of movement.
Habit does not solely close us off from the past, though. It also dilutes the experience of the present. We feel the way seasons, like winter, shape the way the every day unfolds around us. Currently, I’m sitting under an immense grey sky, taking a slow tram through the city. It’s a Wednesday morning and a working day like any other. Ordinariness hangs all around me. The tram is filled with people, with all the seats taken by the elderly. The younger, almost all of them on their way to work, stand around with their heavy bags on their backs. There are also a few children who are most likely on their way to school. Heads look downwards, staring at screens. Some are listening to music, some are sleeping, and not a word is spoken. Only the occasional sound of the tram’s bells interrupts this silence, after which the rustling of steps and coats takes over. The bells sound and the doors are shut. Silence reins again.
And we repeat this monotony every day! First throughout months, and then throughout years. We are detached and thrown back into the seasons themselves, too. As the seasons roll and roll away, we stop caring for these empty tram rides. All one remembers after a while are the leaves on trees. Green means summer, orange means fall, and no leaves mean winter. Our systems distance us from the world to then trap us in their little language games, made ours. It becomes increasingly more difficult to slow down, even for a single moment, the sheer force of the theoretical. We are constantly interpreting what is moving in front of our eyes. It’s not that reminiscence is not permitted, it’s rather that we are no longer able to feel the past. The present is too vivid for us to close our eyes. Grey and windy days seem an eternity away over summer and warm evenings in a square are separated from us by an infinity over winter.
Still, we have a vague awareness of the year’s different seasons. We know that spring, then summer, and in turn fall and winter will arrive. We anticipate the intimacy that summer has to offer us. We also wait for the passivity which we lead our lives with in winter, relinquishing control and letting her lull us to sleep with her monotony. But, because seasons are first and foremost concerned with habit itself, we experience only the present one; and in this tram ride, that’s winter. One can’t help but feel the claustrophobia induced by the endless overcast sky, the punctuality of the curfew imposed on us by the night, the aimlessness with which we drift from day to day. And the oppression of the very body of this tram! Winter does not only invite an appreciation of its natural beauty but demands the life of the every day to dedicate itself to its power. It forces the air down our throats, let that be the harshness of evening breaths, or the scent of hot chocolate. We get so absorbed in the custom of our every day that our invitation is, at last, revoked. We merely have mechanical routine lined with the mundane of the cold. Even though we lead our daily lives interconnected with winter, we no longer experience the young beauty of what this season once was. We no longer experience any of the seasons as they were in their prime. The idea of summer, for example, is completely lost. The insistence of habit always de-sensibilizes us eventually. Regardless of if it’s the crisp snow on a December morning, or the ceaseless pounding of waves, winter nestles itself into all the carriages of life.
Of course, all of this feels natural for everyone around me. It’s easy getting used to habit. Maybe too easy. They direct this tram ride to their offices and their stores. Intention weighs in the air, everyone is waiting for this moment of their day to be over. A means contained wholly in itself. And they do this every day, aiming forward by waiting, waiting with their bags, their phones, their coats. It wasn’t always like this, though. People used to appreciate the texture of habit. They used to admire the city and its people while taking the tram. There were nights, so distant from now, where it was precisely the ride that we took the tram for…
Streetlamps rush by on the street outside and the tram windows flicker and flash. Figures, store windows and cars pass silhouettes over the golden light everywhere. Inside, the air is intoxicated by talk and jokes. I’m standing by one of the doors, leaning on a pole, listening to the voices of my friends dance around me. Remembrances, desires, hopes – these are the stops of tonight’s tram ride. We speed past countless streets and avenues and squares, while the young faces of those around me stay just as flushed, just as fresh throughout. Eyes shining, feet tapping the floor, smiles escaping mouths– they’re not aware of their youth!
Outside on the cold streets, however, the night is not as caring as it is with us. People wandering back home from their day’s work dot deserted sidewalks. They turn a corner – and they disappear without a trace. The constants of their life, like their couch at home, last night’s dinner, their warm beds– in short, unconscious habit – tug on them, pulling them back into the comfort of their own homes. For them, life has progressed all the way up to the present moment just to exist as a mixture of images. Yes, some of them do stand out, perhaps with a stronger taste. First dates, parties, trips. Whatever surrounds these monuments of the past, though, remain as faint images, silent waves washing up on the shore where the grey sky looms overhead. Constantly rotating through the moments of life, without any attention to the present, the only things that one remembers after a while are what one has taken photographs of. It has become so difficult to dedicate ourselves fully to the present, even for a single moment. We find it so much easier to let ourselves be swept along by routine, as we have done for so long. And it is such loyalty to the mundane that stretches out one’s life.
But here, in our tram that’s blazing through at an ignorant speed, history, as soon as it touches the present, vanishes. Each moment is a symbol that stands for nothing but itself. There’s nothing without – all ends are within. Images come one after another at oblivious speeds. A brushing of hair, a wink. I need to catch them all, or I miss everything! The subtleties on the verge of experience and unconsciousness are what one treasures the most once they’re gone. All these gestures, looks and laughter are bound up in an intimacy with the present. These moments exist merely because another moment will follow them. They ask nothing of the future and neither do they lean on the past. The present, as insignificant as it may appear, consumes experience.
A controlled chaos is released into the air and condenses on the windows of the tram. In that brief instant, a grand silence settles down in the tram – on every seat, every pole, every button. No one sees outside, no one sees inside. During this thin slice of time, a harmony between action and the present, between old and young, between life and mere existence, forms and persists without contradiction. It rises out of the present, over the crowd of memories, to bask in its moment of glory. Lingering impressions are collected into one big basket and are infatuated with the present. Now, the rest – remembrances of things past – are reduced to shadows. The essence of the immense night is captured in this single carriage.
No attempts at preserving it have ever worked. Someone adjusts their collar, and everything shatters. The windows clear up, and we are once again just seen, seen as students, seen as everyone else, seen as lives staring at the future.
The bells of the tram ring, and I realize I’m at my stop. I jump up and rush out into the street. Stung by the air, I realize I’m back to where I started from.