Lights

I look out of the train window and find the world condensed into a few dots of moving lights. The cars, jeeps, buses and trucks below wearily inch their way towards their destination, and they bring their lights with them until they fade away into the distance, replaced by new lights.

Something about city lights attracts me like a moth to a gasoline lamp. They are brilliant and twinkling like stars, only nearer, and I am drawn, awed. Imagine how civilization used to consist of scattered fires over windswept plains, and the gods would peer over the world and see Man as the small and dirty animals we are. But now we’re small and dirty animals with concrete cities and magnificent lights to cover our smallness and filth. The gods may have withdrawn to their smoking rooms a little less smug.

I think about all this as I stare out, hypnotized. The background hum of the people swaying in the train dies out, the smell of dried sweat blown around by the jacked up air-conditioning ceases to bother me.