Speed and Soul: A Tale of Two Journeys — Epoche B2
The Speed of Modernity The G-train from Shanghai Hongqiao to Nanjing South covers just over three hundred kilometres in a little under ninety minutes. I had a second-class seat by the window, and spent the first twenty minutes watching the display above the carriage door climb to 348 kilometres per hour and stay there. Outside, the Yangtze delta arrived as colour rather than as landscape: the green of a paddy field, the grey of a factory town, the white flank of an apartment block, none of it lasting long enough to become a place. Somewhere before Changzhou I noticed that I had stopped looking out of the window and started looking at my phone, and that the two activities had come to feel more or less identical. Two numbers in that paragraph do not agree, and the disagreement is worth a moment. Taking three hundred kilometres and ninety minutes as round figures, the average speed of the journey is 200 kilometres per hour, which is a long way below the 348 on the display. At a steady 348 the same distance would take about fifty-two minutes; the missing thirty-eight are the whole cost of leaving and entering stations, spent accelerating, braking and standing still. That is why timetables reward the services that skip stops, and why a station is a more expensive thing to add to a high-speed line than a kilometre of track. The second figure explains what the window was doing. In metres per second, 348 kilometres per hour is $$v = \frac{348\,000\ \mathrm{m}}{3600\ \mathrm{s}} \approx 96.7\ \mathrm{m\,s^{-1}},$$ so a field a hundred metres across is in view for about one second. But duration is not really the problem; angular speed is. An object lying a perpendicular distance $d$ from the track sweeps across the field of view, at its closest approach, at an angular rate $\omega = v/d$ — the same reason a passing lamp-post blurs while a distant hill does not. For something fifty metres away, $$\omega = \frac{96.7\ \mathrm{m\,s^{-1}}}{50\ \mathrm{m}} \approx 1.93\ \mathrm{rad\,s^{-1}} \approx 111^\circ\,\mathrm{s^{-1}}.$$ The eye follows moving objects by a movement called smooth pursuit which, as Carpenter's standard account of eye movements sets out, tracks accurately only up to something like thirty degrees per second; beyond that the eye falls behind and the image slips across the retina. Setting $\omega$ to that limit and solving for distance gives $d = v/\omega \approx 185$ metres. Everything closer than roughly two hundred metres from the track is therefore not merely quick but untrackable: the eye cannot lock onto it, and it registers as a smear of colour. What survives is the far field — and in the Yangtze delta the far field is flat, hazy and largely uniform. That is the whole of the reason the delta arrived as colour rather than as landscape. The window had not shown me less; it had shown me a stream at a rate my eyes could sample but not follow, which is also a fair description of a phone. The same complaint at fifty kilometres an hour Before drawing any conclusion from that, one assumption in it needs testing: that this is a condition of modern speed. It is not, and the evidence is a century and a half old. Wolfgang Schivelbusch's history of the nineteenth-century railway collects what travellers wrote when trains first reached forty or fifty kilometres an hour. They reported precisely what I reported: that the foreground had been destroyed, that objects near the line could no longer be seen at all, and that what remained was a moving panorama viewed as though through a frame. They found it disorienting and many found it unpleasant. Within a generation the response had settled into the one I adopted before Changzhou — reading. Schivelbusch traces the rise of the station bookstall to exactly this period, as a trade selling something to do with a journey that had ceased to be worth looking at. The arithmetic above shows why the two experiences are the same experience. At fifty kilometres an hour, or 13.9 metres per second, the untrackable distance is $13.9 / 0.524 \approx 27$ metres — the width of a field boundary, a hedge, a station platform. Everything within that band was lost to the Victorian passenger just as everything within 185 metres is lost to me. The difference between 1845 and now is where the boundary sits, not whether there is one. So the honest form of the complaint is not that modern travel has destroyed attention. It is that any speed destroys the part of the visible world that lies inside its own threshold, and that we have been renegotiating what counts as scenery ever since we stopped walking. Echoes of Ancient Roads What the journey brought to mind was Du Fu, who crossed much of the same country on foot and by cart, and whose poems record every difficult stage of it. 'Spring View' (春望) was written in the spring of 757 — Stephen Owen's complete translation prints it among the poems of that year — and it is worth being accurate about the circumstances, because they are usually softened. It is not a travelling poem at all. The rebellion of An Lushan had begun at the end of 755; the armies took the capital, Chang'an, the following summer, and Du Fu, captured while trying to reach the court of the new emperor in exile, was being held inside the fallen city and could not leave it. Its opening line is usually given in English as 'The nation is shattered; mountains and rivers remain.' The poem's power is not spontaneity, and saying so requires knowing what kind of object it is. 'Spring View' is a 律詩 ( lüshi ), or regulated verse, and Zong-qi Cai's guided anthology sets out what the form demands: eight lines of five characters each, composed under a fixed pattern of level and oblique tones, with the requirement that the two middle couplets be grammatically parallel line against line. The opening couplet sets 國 (state) against 城 (city), 破 (broken) against 春 (spring), 山河 (mountains and rivers) against 草木 (grass and trees), and closes one line with 在 (remain) and the next with