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Although we today often lament our modern pace of life, especially our “always-on” modern work culture, Henry David Thoreau also lamented the accelerated pace of life that was emerging even back in the mid-1800s with the rise of urban living and of innovations like the telegraph and the then-relatively-new railroads sprawling across the land. (It makes me wonder if the Ancient Romans also lamented the fast pace of then-modern Roman life with their paved roads and with their chariots rumbling and whizzing by along the Appian Way!)

Thoreau’s thoughts about the railroads are almost paradoxical. On the one hand, Thoreau is quite critical of those who do things “railroad fashion,” as he calls it:

To do things “railroad fashion” is now the by-word; and it is worth the while to be warned so often and so sincerely by any power to get off its track. (Thoreau, Walden; Or, Life in the Woods, Sounds)

In other places, however, Thoreau seems caught up in the romance of the railroads, finding transcendence in the cry of the locomotive’s whistle as much as in the birdsong dancing on the winds across Walden Pond:

When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving off with planetary motion,—or, rather, like a comet, for the beholder knows not if with that velocity and with that direction it will ever revisit this system, since its orbit does not look like a returning curve,—with its steam cloud like a banner streaming behind in golden and silver wreaths, like many a downy cloud which I have seen, high in the heavens, unfolding its masses to the light,—as if this travelling demigod, this cloud-compeller, would ere long take the sunset sky for the livery of his train; when I hear the iron horse make the hills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils, (what kind of winged horse or fiery dragon they will put into the new Mythology I don’t know), it seems as if the earth had got a race now worthy to inhabit it. If all were as it seems, and men made the elements their servants for noble ends! If the cloud that hangs over the engine were the perspiration of heroic deeds, or as beneficent as that which floats over the farmer’s fields, then the elements and Nature herself would cheerfully accompany men on their errands and be their escort.
I watch the passage of the morning cars with the same feeling that I do the rising of the sun, which is hardly more regular. Their train of clouds stretching far behind and rising higher and higher, going to heaven while the cars are going to Boston, conceals the sun for a minute and casts my distant field into the shade, a celestial train beside which the petty train of cars which hugs the earth is but the barb of the spear. The stabler of the iron horse was up early this winter morning by the light of the stars amid the mountains, to fodder and harness his steed. Fire, too, was awakened thus early to put the vital heat in him and get him off. If the enterprise were as innocent as it is early! If the snow lies deep, they strap on his snow-shoes, and with the giant plow, plow a furrow from the mountains to the seaboard, in which the cars, like a following drill-barrow, sprinkle all the restless men and floating merchandise in the country for seed. All day the fire-steed flies over the country, stopping only that his master may rest, and I am awakened by his tramp and defiant snort at midnight, when in some remote glen in the woods he fronts the elements incased in ice and snow; and he will reach his stall only with the morning star, to start once more on his travels without rest or slumber. Or perchance, at evening, I hear him in his stable blowing off the superfluous energy of the day, that he may calm his nerves and cool his liver and brain for a few hours of iron slumber. If the enterprise were as heroic and commanding as it is protracted and unwearied! (Thoreau, Walden; Or, Life in the Woods, Sounds)

A freight train in the distance can still be a thing of beauty, even when contrasted with the natural beauty on either side of the rails.

It’s fascinating to me that Thoreau can simultaneously lament the effects of the railroads on the culture of the day while also praising their nobility and grandeur as eloquently as he praises any more-natural wonders. Are we today any different? Don’t we all have a love-hate relationship with our smartphones, our laptops, our vehicles, even our email accounts and our online investment accounts? How much of our own freedom do we sacrifice for the sake of convenience?—itself paradoxical given that modern conveniences are supposed to save us time, not eat up more of our time.

Can we find the balance that Thoreau was seeking to find between the romance of modern life, with its iron horses breathing fire and billowing smoke into the sunset as it pulls its way along the rails, while avoiding the trappings of doing things “railroad fashion,” ever faster, ever rushed, and ever so less time for the transcendent experiences of life for which Thoreau was so hungry? Can we appreciate the aesthetic beauty of an iPhone and all the magical creative and communicative powers it gives us while not being slaves to our devices as 19th-century Americans became slaves to the railroads?

Can we marvel at soaring through the clouds like the birds and sky-chariots of ancient mythology without losing ourselves and our humanity in crowded lines at the airport? Can we delight in what new media forms such as radio, motion pictures, television, and now YouTube have given to the dramatic arts without becoming the couch potatoes our parents and grandparents warned us we might become? Can we embrace the conveniences of email, text messaging, and even blogging, but still find the wherewithal and our own human voices to write something worth reading in the first place?

Thoreau, the ancient Stoic philosophers, and I are all kinsmen. I see the dangers of a hurried life as much as they did in their own time. Seneca the Younger warned of being so voracious for reading that you don’t take the time to separate the wheat from the chaff, advised that we should slow down to take the time to read and write things that are genuinely edifying instead of being endless consumers of words with no time for wisdom. And Thoreau saw the way in which a hurried life and the cares of the day can rob us not only of our time but of our humanity as well.

We are all riding the railroad that Thoreau saw on the horizon. Except now that railroad is pervasive; it has snatched up every aspect of our lives in the form of our technological world, stealing our time and our inner voices in the process, so much so that we barely see even the romance of our modern ways life in the haze of their convenience. As Vanilla Ice once proclaimed in his cover of the song “Stop That Train” (on the album To The Extreme) originally by the Jamaican ska band The Spanishtonians, “Stop that train, I wanna get off.” Seneca, Thoreau, I, and likely all of us have shared that sentiment at one time or another.

Are we already on the bullet train of modern life with no way to bring it to a halt for the sake of our own humanity?

Yet, is the train already moving too fast? Are we on a runaway train with no time for it to come to a halt in the span of a modern human lifetime? Will we have to find a way to keep our humanity alive within ourselves and as a society, not from a distance as Thoreau had the luxury of doing, but while riding the train at full throttle with no ability to slow it, much less to bring it to a complete stop and hop off? If we are on this train for life, we must not lose ourselves in the process. As Thoreau put it elsewhere in Walden:

It lives too fast. Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. If we do not get out sleepers, and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build railroads? And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven in season? But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irish-man, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a new lot is laid down and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon. (Thoreau, Walden; Or, Life in the Woods, Where I Lived, and What I Lived For)

“We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.” (Thoreau, Walden; Or, Life in the Woods, Where I Lived, and What I Lived For) — *“We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.”* (Thoreau, *Walden; Or, Life in the Woods*, Where I Lived, and What I Lived For)

What might Thoreau have thought of automobiles, bullet trains, airplanes that break the sound barrier, and rockets that carry us to the Moon? Will we let these wonders drive, fly, and ride all over us as much as the railroads of Thoreau’s time rode on the backs of men whose lives were wasted both in their construction and the time and personal liberty lost in their use? Or will we find a way to tame the beasts of aluminum and steel that soar above us and zip past us, even the beasts of plastic and glass we carry in our pockets, more albatross than phoenix?

Smartphones: Prisons of glass and plastic we carry with us wherever we go.

Worst of all, will we spend our days endlessly waving goodby to our own lives from within the many prisons we have built for ourselves, those that move in the form of cars and planes, and those that don’t move in the forms of our office buildings and even our own houses? As the character Chirrut said in the film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story:

There is more than one sort of prison. I sense that you carry yours wherever you go.

While we may not be able to stop the train of modern life, we don’t have to let it become a prison for ourselves. Just as Thoreau perceived beauty and majesty in the booming thunder and billowing fire trail of the locomotive on the horizon, we too can find a way to have our own fully-human transcendent experiences and to claim our birthright as human beings, even while riding the metaphorical rails of our modern lives, no matter how fast the train is traveling.