Ghost Stations

In Berlin during the cold war, especially after East Germany put up the wall, there were a few stations on the underground line that were shut down to keep the two countries divided. "The Wall" as we call it in English, wasn't a straight monolithic structure. Before I had visited Berlin, I had the idea that it was something like the Great Wall of China, but it wasn't. It meandered between the two cities, and because of this, it created the strange situation where the western public transit system ran through formerly open stations, but was not allowed to stop at them. The stations were often unlit or dimly lit, and were patrolled by east-German police. So west Berliners would ride past these "ghost stations" and never stop. In fact, during the few mechanical breakdowns, the West Berliners were forced to stay in the cars until a detachment of East German police came to escort them back to one of the stations in West Berlin.

I had the chance to visit Berlin once in 1991, right after the wall came down, and again in September of 2007. On my second trip, I visited almost all of these ghost stations, not as a part of any tour, but simply because I had a 3 day public transit pass and used it to go all around the central part of the city. The striking thing is that now that the city is whole again, now that the halves have been reunited, the ghost stations retain almost none of their former strangeness. Except for a few oddities in how the corridors connect, there is no indication that these were, for almost thirty years, empty and desolate places.

I often have passed by the inaccessible, the shrouded, and the strange in my own heart and in my own life. I've known that if I exited the speeding train in these dark places, that my life would be forever changed. And yet there is a thrill of seeing the unknown -- of dreaming of the options in the shadows, that seems to beckon us with its strangeness while still repelling us and making us thankful that we sit in the well-lighted train divided from the darkness by glass, metal, and velocity.

This abiding schism between the longings of humanity can be seen in our opposing desires for comfort and for excitement, for steady, committed love and for passion, for being known and for being a compelling enigma. We don't only long for what we can't have, we actually long for impossible opposites. We witness this in the person who strives for celebrity and then achieves it and moans about the horror of constant attention. We witness this in the emptiness that comes with slating our desires and cocooning ourselves from the world. We even see it in souls like Mother Theresa who struggled through darkness and despair in the midst of what so many of us lionized as a selfless and exemplary life. No matter what we do, for good or for ill, at some point we will be on the train looking out at the other world, dimly lit and inaccessible, and at that moment we will think (almost simultaneously) "if only" and "thank goodness, no."

Perhaps somewhere in the future we can glimpse in hope a future time or another existence where these contrary lives will be joined together and the goodness of all possible options will come together in a new post-longing perfection while the bad will fade like a ghost station into the forgotten realms of the past, or perhaps the train will continue on to our destination and the strangeness of the world behind the glass will continue to haunt us.