Of all modes of transport, the train is perhaps the best aid to thought: the views have none of the potential monotony of those on a ship or a plane, they move fast enough for us not to get exasperated but slowly enough to allow us to identify objects. They offer us brief, inspiring glimpses into private domains, letting us see a woman at the moment when she takes a cup from a shelf in her kitchen, before carrying us on to a patio where a man is sleeping and then to a park where a child is catching a ball thrown by a figure we cannot see.
At the end of hours of train-dreaming, we may feel we have been returned to ourselves: that is, brought back into contact with emotions and ideas of importance to us. It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, but who may not be who we essentially are.
- Alain de Botton, "On the Pleasures of Sadness"
