Each A Glimpse And Gone Forever

A month of looking out windows, seeing Eastern Europe pass by, scene by scene.

I mostly sat in the left row of seats, looking out the left window. Some views repeated themselves: endless fields of sunflowers; railway workers not working.

On a late summer evening in 2017, I boarded the sleeper train from Istanbul to Sophia. From there on, I travelled through Bulgaria and Romania, to Hungary, Ukraine and Poland, mostly by train, sometimes by bus. As always when I travel, my face was stuck to the window, my mind trying to piece together an understanding of the landscape, the people, from brief glimpses of other men’s lives.

Through thousands of kilometres on rail and road I followed the passing landscape and recorded some moments, some views: Each a glimpse and gone forever, to quote the closing line in Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous railway poem.