Your destination and in which class, this is determined by God, the director of the train

The one line I've never been sure about in Tony Kushner's A Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds (1997)—his version of An-sky by way of Neugroschel—belongs to an invented scene at the start of the third act, set among passengers disembarking from the train to Miropol. Their choral kibitzing rhymes with the talk of the idlers in the synagogue of Brinnitz, the one recounting tales of wonder-workers and tzadiks, the other praising the modern miracles of technology, both met with the same equanimity by the gravely double-speaking Messenger. Dismissing his mention of dybbuks as obsolete superstition, the passengers go off happily chattering of the crackling, streamlined equality of the new century: "In a world without candles, there will be no more dybbuks . . . Give me electric light. In a world of electric light, even Jews can ride the trains." Later in the play, Reb Azriel and his scribe will be vouchsafed an unsettling, perhaps diabolical forewarning of the Holocaust ("the wonders of the coming age / will dwarf your shtetl magic so— / dybbuks, golems, all you know, / your writings and the words you say / like oven ashes, swept away") which I also find unnecessary, because it's not as though the shadow of the Holocaust doesn't fall backward across all Jewish history and especially Eastern Europe entering the twentieth century—when Leye mourns the unborn children she will never bear Khonen except in dreams, the audience knows as she doesn't their likely fate if she'd borne them in real history—but it doesn't twinge at me the same way. The line about the trains just feels like a hi-hat, an obviously ironic sting. Jews and trains, right? But the past doesn't always need to be ironically unaware of what's in store. It's not like we would have seen it coming, either.

Anyway, here I am on another train, with one of those luminous flat skies—fish-eye parchment-silver—standing behind the curling green trees and the dry stone cuts traveling shadowlessly away behind me. I slept very little and expect to faceplant at ladymondegreen's. I can't remember if I used to consider four hours a long train ride, but now that D.C. is within my sphere of reasonable rail travel, apparently I just think it's not really enough time to sleep. I may try nonetheless. If not, my mother lent me a thematically appropriate trip book: Martin Edwards' Blood on the Tracks: Railway Mysteries (2018). Imagine what I could do with a real rail system in this country.

[edit] I dozed for an hour in Connecticut and dreamed of sleep paralysis. Thanks, Connecticut. But I am in Jersey City now and everything is better. I have just finished winding a skein of blue-shifting goldenrod acrylic yarn. It looks like a tapestry of a medieval sunset. And I am not on a train.