The Man Who Watched Trains Go By

4 ideas

1. Kees Popinga's flight from respectable life

   Kees Popinga, a meticulous Groningen shipping clerk with a wife, children and a comfortable house, learns one night from his employer Julius de Coster that the firm is ruined and that de Coster will fake his death and vanish. Popinga walks out on his life, goes to Amsterdam, tries to seduce de Coster's mistress Pamela, and when she laughs at him he gags her and she dies. He then flees to Paris, where he becomes entangled with the prostitute Jeanne Rozier and her criminal circle, is robbed, is hunted, and is finally caught and committed to an asylum, apparently tired rather than defiant.

2. Borrowed order and its sudden collapse

   A person can obey rules because trusted others appear to obey them, without ever holding those rules as convictions of their own. When a pillar of that order, here the employer Popinga revered, is exposed as a fraud who simply walks away, the whole structure suddenly looks like an arbitrary game. The rules lose their hold all at once rather than gradually, and suppressed fantasies of escape become actionable overnight.

3. Transgression breeds a hunger for recognition

   Popinga's escape does not satisfy him. He wants to be seen and correctly understood, so he writes letters to the Paris newspapers disputing how they portray him, insisting he is lucid, and taunting the police. The man who broke free of social judgment ends up more dependent on public judgment than before, because an identity he invented alone has no one else to confirm it.

4. The liberated man carries his cage

   Watch what an escapee does with his freedom, and you often see his old habits running without their old purpose. In Paris Popinga plans, calculates and keeps order with the same clerk's fastidiousness he had in Groningen. Casting off a role does not produce a new self; it strips away the context that gave the old habits meaning, and what is left unravels.

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