There are moments when life's train flows smoothly along, when, though the track below may be rough, the rhythm of its jarring has become familiar, and one is lulled into a pleasant torpor. One seems to be on a circular track — to one side, city, on the other, forest — and whether seen in day or night, summer or winter, the only difference is the weather, the light, and whether or not the trees have their leaves. It is difficult to say whether one is content or discontent in these periods (the difference appears to be so small) but one is indeed comfortable in this uncertainty, for habit has taken hold and has one under its sway.

If there is a scarcity of coal to stoke the boiler, it can be imported at a premium from some distant, yet no doubt thriving, locale; nowhere is there found a desire for things to be any different than they are; change of even a beneficial variety is looked upon with distrust, and again the engine picks up speed, and again one is back to a sleepily motionless motion.

Where the smog-spewing centipede passes cliffs, one is wary of boulders marring the tracks' clean lines, through marsh one divines with the farmer's almanac the probability of submersion, and through desert one reaches for the clothed canteen to slake one's thirst raised by the long, arid travail. Living aboard life's train is hard work, after all — one must blink ten thousand times a day while riding.

The idea of switching to an entirely unfamiliar track, perhaps on a diametrically opposed circle that completes infinity's sign, is not only distasteful to contemplate, but abhorrent to the daydreaming rider. The possibility that the train may be de-comissioned and the entire track ripped up by meddling aeons-to-come cannot enter the mind of the one so arrogantly anchored in loyalty to a rust bucket, that is, however, their precious rust-bucket. Odes are even sung to the groan of its joints, murals of oxidation made to its glory.

Then the day comes that orders come down from the bosses' bosses; the train must go. But first, it must be redirected onto another path, straight instead of circular, that leads across absurd topography all the way over the long planet. The inhabitants of the train, their ears stuffed, their eyes bleary with long sleep, do not hear any such orders, but gradually with dismay note the difference of their surroundings, no longer feeling the smooth, continuous curvature of their beloved circle-track.

Panic is then born in the breast; one has lived for minutes only; in minutes one will surely die. It is unfathomable that one could expand into a new, simpler way of being, devoid of the old necessary comforts of familiar apathy and pious hedonism. The train has switched its track ages ago, but for oneself, the old path is etched into awareness to a traumatic depth. It overlays its antique charm on the hellishness of the new path, and one is thrown into desperation, willing almost to throw oneself into the furnace rather than breathe the strange air of the strange country one now navigates.

Those who choose to live after the switch assimilate to various depths the comprehension that some fundamental aspect of cosmic law is not what they believed it to be, and by those various degrees they grow capable of enduring the new jarrs, the new air, the new sights, the rough fare of the despicable track upon which they find themselves. Knowing their discomfort to be flimsy as the false security rent like a paper veil by the previous cataclysm's machete, they fall back into a pleasant torpor — yet now, they sleep with one eye open.