Thoreau is skeptical, as well, of the change in popular
mindset brought by train travel. “Have not men improved somewhat
in punctuality since the railroad was invented?” he asks with scarcely concealed
irony, as if punctuality were the greatest virtue progress can offer.
People “talk and think faster in the depot” than they did earlier
in stagecoach offices, but here again, speedy talk and quick thinking
are hardly preferable to thoughtful speech and deep thinking. Trains,
like all technological “improvements” give people an illusion of
heightened freedom, but in fact represent a new servitude, since
one must always be subservient to fixed train schedules and routes.
For Thoreau, the train has given us a new illusion of a controlling
destiny: “We have constructed a fate, a new Atropos, that
never turns aside.” As the Greek goddess Atropos worked—she determined
the length of human lives and could never be swayed (her name means
“unswerving”)—so too does the train chug along on its fixed path
and make us believe that our lives must too.
