M Train

“It occurred to me, as the heavy curtains were opened and the morning light flooded the small dining area, that without a doubt we sometimes eclipse our own dreams with reality.”

There is a tension between Smith’s dreams and the reality she describes. Her dreams are often meaningfully connected to the things she experiences in her waking world, but here, Smith explores the false meanings that reality can impose on the world of the dream.

“Personally, I’m not much for symbolism. I never get it. Why can’t things be just as they are?”

Although Smith weaves a narrative full of allusions and symbolism, she also expresses a desire for things to be as they are. She craves experiences free of symbolism and metaphor where she can immerse herself in reality. This statement becomes increasingly ironic as the memoir progresses, as many everyday objects become imbued with deep, personal meanings.

“I wrote about a traveler who didn’t travel. I wrote about a girl on the lam whose namesake was Saint Lucy, symbolized by the image of two eyes upon a plate. Every time I fried two eggs sunny-side up I thought of her.”

Saint Lucy is a Catholic saint who, according to accounts of her martyrdom from the 15th century and onward, was tortured by Romans and had her eyes gouged out. Earlier accounts say she was stabbed in the throat instead. In representing her eyes with fried eggs, Smith alludes to the text’s central idea that lost things are never gone for good, though in a tongue-in-cheek way.

“Real time, I reasoned, cannot be divided into sections like numbers on the face of a clock. If I write about the past as I simultaneously dwell in the present, am I still in real time?”

Smith interrogates the nature of time in the context of writing and explores how writing allows her to travel to different times. She questions whether writing is a kind of travel that takes her outside of “real time” to exist among people who are, in the present, gone. This question is reflected in the memoir’s nonlinear, impressionistic style.

“Not all dreams need to be realized. That was what Fred used to say. We accomplished things that no one would ever know.”

Fred’s words of wisdom stay with Smith and foreshadow the fact that Smith’s dream of bringing the stone from the Saint-Laurent prison to Jean Genet will never be realized. They also speak to many situations in Smith’s life in which dreams and reality do not match up.

“Looking back, long after his death, our way of living seems a miracle, one that could only be achieved by the silent synchronization of the jewels and gears of a common mind.”

When Smith looks back at her life with Fred, she is struck by how they used to live as if outside the flow of time. They were able to ignore the clock, as it were, because of how connected they were with one another. She uses a metaphor to compare their love to a watch, an intricate, perfectly balanced machine.

“How is it that we never completely comprehend our love for someone until they’re gone?”

Smith speaks to a common idea when dealing with Grief and Loss: A true understanding of a loved one, cruelly, only comes after they are gone. Throughout M Train, Smith’s experiences show her insights into the lives of those she has lost.

“What are you writing?

I looked up at her, somewhat surprised. I had absolutely no idea.”

Here, we see Smith once again engaged in the task of Writing About Nothing. This is not, however, a deliberate attempt to write about nothing, and she is taken aback when she realizes she has no clue what she is writing about.

“Greek legends don’t tell us anything, he was saying. Legends are stories. People interpret them or attach morals to them. Medea or the Crucifixion, you can’t break them down. The rain and the sun came simultaneously and begat a rainbow. Medea found Jason’s eyes and she sacrificed their children. These things happen, that’s all, the undeniable domino effect of being alive.”

In Smith’s dream, the cowpoke reminds her that meaning comes from the act of interpretation. While actions and events are simply things that happen, people attach morals and interpretations to them, which is where meaning comes from. The cowpoke juxtaposes two extremely different legends—in the story of the crucifixion, Christ sacrifices himself, and in Greek mythology, Jason leaves Medea for the king’s daughter and Medea murders his new wife, the king, and their children to spurn him—to illustrate how morals and meanings can be found and created in different places.

“It’s a holy stone, I told him, and begged him not to toss it away, which he did without flinching. It bothered me deeply. I had taken a beautiful object, formed by nature, out of its habitat to be thrown into a sack of security rubble.”

Smith is upset at the callous way the airport security guard tosses away the stone. It becomes one of the many objects that Smith loses over the course of M Train. She also feels that she has acted wrongly by taking the stone without thinking about it.

“Perhaps because I had found a place of my own and now the Miyawaki place could spin in reverse, happily back to the interconnected world of Murakami. The wind-up bird’s work was done.”

Smith comes to see the titular wind-up bird from Murakami’s novel as a kind of guide. It is tied to a mysterious house that Smith wishes she could find, and it is only once she acquires the bungalow that the Miyawaki house—and the wind-up bird—fade from her mind.

“Sixty-six, I thought, what the hell. I could feel my chronology mounting, snow approaching.”

Smith reflects on her life and the strangeness of her new age. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, she confronts what this age means to her. She is now older than the people she has lost, which is difficult to come to terms with.

“Lost things. They claw through the membranes, attempting to summon our attention through an indecipherable mayday. Words tumble in helpless disorder. The dead speak. We have forgotten how to listen.”

Smith contemplates all the things that she has lost over the course of her life and wonders if they are all speaking to her from another world, like the spirits of the dead. She wonders if she has forgotten how to listen.

“Just six months ago I had scrawled I love the boardwalk on a page of my notebook with the effusive sincerity of a teenage girl. Gone is that infatuation, that untapped simplicity embraced. And I am left with a longing for the way things were.”

The Grief and Loss that Smith feels for the people she has lost are linked to the grief she feels over the loss of beloved objects and places. She longs for things to be as they were, for lost things to be returned, and for lost people to come back.

“Midflight I began to weep. Just come back, I was thinking. You’ve been gone long enough. Just come back. I will stop traveling; I will wash your clothes.”

Grief comes back to Smith at unexpected times, illustrating how mourning is a nonlinear and unending process. Though Fred has been dead for many years, Smith still grapples with the dissonance of his absence; she longs for his return, prepared to change her whole life just to have him back. The promises she makes to his spirit range from large—she will stop traveling—to the mundane—she will wash his clothes—illustrating all of the ways love permeates one’s life.

“When I was young I had the notion to think and write simultaneously, but I could never keep up with myself. I gave up the pursuit and I wrote in my head as I sat with my dog by a secret stream incandescent with rainbows, a mix of sun and petrol, skimming the water like weightless Merbabies with iridescent wings.”

Smith explores the writer’s process, noting that a big part of writing is actually just thinking. Smith’s mind races ahead faster than her hand can write, so much of her “writing” happens in her head, where she works out fantastical ideas before she can commit them to the page. These ideas are represented here through magical imagery: iridescence, merbabies, and rainbows.

“I looked down at the bleak panorama and shook my head. How could I take a picture of nothing?”

Looking at the devastation left behind by the tsunami in Japan, Smith is struck by the impossibility of photographing so much nothing. This idea ties back to her question of Writing About Nothing; it is just as difficult to photograph nothing as it is to write about it.

“Nothing can be truly replicated. Not a love, not a jewel, not a single line.”

Throughout her travels, Smith spends a lot of time looking to recapture some of the things she has lost, including her perfect lost photographs of Sylvia Plath’s grave. As she tries in vain to recreate those photos, she realizes that nothing that is lost can ever be replaced; it seems that what is gone is gone forever, even if new reminders appear afterward.

“I sat on the makeshift step of what would be my refurbished porch and envisioned a yard with wildflowers. Anxious for some permanency, I guess I needed to be reminded how temporal permanency is.”

Looking out at the backyard of her bungalow, Smith envisions a space that is both permanent and impermanent, a paradox. The wildflowers remind her that permanence is an illusion: Change will always come, and nothing stays the same forever.

“Now it’s your song, I said, addressing a lingering void. The world seemed drained of wonder. I did not write poems in a fever. I did not see the spirit of Fred before me or feel the spinning trajectory of his journey.”

Consumed by grief in the immediate aftermath of Fred’s death, Smith does not feel that Fred’s spirit is nearby; she feels only a void. It will be many years before Fred feels like a presence instead of nothingness.

“There is only one directive: that the lost are found; that the thick leaves encasing the dead are parted and they are lifted into the arms of light.”

Smith fights back against the idea that lost things are gone forever. In her imagined continuation of The Killing, she wishes for a world where all that is lost, including objects and people, returns to the world once again.

“Why is it that we lose the things we love, and things cavalier cling to us and will be the measure of our worth after we’re gone?”

Smith sees the cruelty of losing the things that are most precious. She wonders why the objects that remain after a death become the primary measure of a life, though as she observes elsewhere, death imbues everything with new meaning.

“I believe in movement. I believe in that lighthearted balloon, the world. I believe in midnight and the hour of noon. But what else do I believe in? Sometimes everything. Sometimes nothing. It fluctuates like light flitting over a pond. I believe in life, which one day each of us shall lose.”

Smith makes peace with life’s impermanence and the fact that life is simply another thing to lose. She celebrates everything, nothing, movement, and all the little contradictions that life brings.