someone threw themselves in front a train i was on yesterday and everyone around me got on their phones and angrily complained about how it would make them late, so i found the event distressing on more than one level. after it happened i tried hard to grasp onto the thoughts flashing through me about it. i began to realise that when the guy heard our train coming around the corner, he must have started to prepare himself for death, take in his life breath, think his last ever thought. the sound of our approach was the signal for the end of a mans life, so i was part of something that was going to kill someone. i found it hard not to be affected by that.
but a lot of people around me weren't affected at all, so maybe i'm just overthinking the whole thing. a woman near me complained that he 'could at least have tried it at night'. this got me thinking that maybe he did deliberately do it in rush hour to make people like this woman think and take notice, or perhaps just to annoy people like this and disrupt their lives as much as possible, and i agree with both these decisions.
he didnt die, though. he was arrested and taken away. i got this image in my head of this man at his lowest point being taken away in a police car as we, the instrument of his intended death, glide passively on. we werent doing anything wrong but somehow i viewed the train as the villain in this story, perhaps because no other one was apparent. i think the whole thing that upset me about what happened was that the world just kept moving onwards after it had swerved to avoid this man, which needed to happen and i'm wrong to want anything else, but my instincts told me that we should somehow pause for longer than was needed to drag him away from the tracks, which is illogical.
"to mourn the dead is to mourn those who were never born"
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I think alot of people are pretty desensitised to things like this. Somebody was raped at Runcorn train station once. The station was closed so they could get evidence. Someone i know said 'couldn't she have got raped after our train?'. Nobody thought about that poor girl waiting for a train and being brutally attacked in a way that will effect her for her entire life. They only cared that it disrupted their day.
Did I ever speak to you about "Coroner's Footnote"? There was a really good, intense applied ethics chat at Chris Rand about it, and I still don't know what to think. The kindest reading is to see very severe depression as a kind of emotional blindness - the idea being, you can't blame people who can't see for walking into you. (In fact, there's obligation on you to get out the way if not help them.)
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