--- title: "I prefer shorter summaries" date: 2026-06-23 description: "The empty platform, the cashier, the stationmaster and the teacher with her thin silk scarf, and captures a conversation about how phone memory erodes concentra" author: "Petru Cojocaru" categories: - name: "#AboutBotoshine" url: "https://cojocarupetru.info/aboutbotoshine.md" --- # I prefer shorter summaries The cold comes first. Before you see anything, before you read the station's name on the freshly painted sign, the cold finds you — a May evening cold, not the brutal, declarative cold of January, but something more insidious: the cold of a night that has not yet decided whether to become summer. It seeps through the new glass of the waiting room, through the renovated walls still smelling of emulsion paint and institutional ambition. I pull my jacket tighter and watch. The platform is empty. Not the emptiness of a station between trains — something more absolute, more settled. The emptiness of a terminus. This is the end of the line, in the most literal administrative sense: a provincial town in the north of Moldova, a town whose railway exists because someone, decades ago, signed a decree. The track stops here. Beyond the buffers, there is only field and the darkening sky above the plain. The station has been renovated. This must be said, because in Romania it is not a trivial matter. The walls are the colour of a governmental idea about cheerfulness — pale yellow, the yellow of cheap margarine. The floor tiles are large and white and still clean, which means the renovation is recent. The ceiling lights are LED, and they hum slightly, that modern hum which is not quite sound and not quite silence but which occupies the room like a low-grade anxiety. There is NO mural painted on the eastern wall: a locomotive, hills, and something meant to be optimistic, rendered in the municipality's colors. It's not ugly. Effort DOES move you, if you let it. I sit on a bench and wait for something to happen. --- ## The cashier ... is a man of about fifty-something, with the face of someone who made his peace with the institution long ago, and the institution with him. Through the glass of his window he is simultaneously present and sealed — his world: a computer terminal, a printer, a stack of papers, a coat hook from which hangs a checked plastic shopping bag. He does not look up when I enter. This is not rudeness. This is the learned stillness of a man who has counted the years by the arrival and departure of trains. I watch him and realise, after a few minutes, that he is looking at something I cannot see. Not at the screen. At something beyond the screen. His hands rest on the keyboard without pressing anything. An expression that is neither sadness nor contentment, but something between the two — that state particular to people who know their thoughts have gone somewhere and that the body will follow them later. His grandson, I suspect — I cannot know for certain, but I sense it in the way his gaze shifts — is about the same age as one of the boys who will soon come through the door. He is somewhere in a university city to the west, studying. He does not write often. When he writes, he writes briefly: *fine, busy, kiss.* Three words and an emoji. The cashier does not know what an emoji is, exactly, but he has learned to recognise the one with small hearts as a sign that everything is all right. Sometimes he sits like this, hands on the keyboard, and calculates: the time there, the time here, what his grandson is doing now, whether he is eating. Whether he is eating properly. That is what he wonders, in that order. Every departure, a ticket. Every ticket, a small vanishing. I do not approach the window. I watch from the bench. --- The stationmaster comes out through a side door. He is a compact man, perhaps sixty, wearing the dark blue uniform of the national railway, but the jacket sits on him with the ease of a garment worn daily for a very long time — not crumpled exactly, but inhabited. On the left lapel there is a small stain I identify, after a moment, as the trace of a sauce. Something with paprika. That orange-red colour of food cooked at home, in a hurry, before the shift. He walks the length of the platform with his hands behind his back, the walk of a man who is sovereign over a small territory and knows it. He checks something at the far end — a notice board, an instrument, a habit — and turns back. He does not look at his watch. He does not need to. The time is inside him, accumulated over decades of shifts and departures. He too has someone who left. Not a grandson — a daughter. To a larger city, several hundred kilometres away. She left at nineteen, with an orange rucksack and a determination he never discussed with her explicitly, because he had understood, without words, that there was no room for discussion. She is twenty-six now. She works. She sends money home sometimes, which bothers him, though he does not say so. She comes at Christmas and Easter and sometimes not even at Easter. The stationmaster has kept his phone on maximum volume since she left. He does not want to miss a call. He has never missed one. She rings rarely. This evening is like all the others. The empty platform. The LED lights. The paprika stain he has not noticed, and which, if he saw it, he would wipe away quickly and flush slightly — not from shame, but from that specific discomfort of people living alone who are caught neglecting something that, with someone at home, they would never have neglected. He goes back through his door. The platform returns to its silence. --- ## Then they arrive. They come through the main entrance in a cluster, the ten of them, with the particular turbulence of adolescents who have been told to be quiet and have interpreted this as an instruction to whisper loudly. Rucksacks. Good shoes, the shoes of families who understand that occasion matters. And one adult among them — a woman, the teacher, perhaps forty, wearing a thin lady's scarf of pale blue wrapped loosely around her neck. The scarf is silk, or something that wants to be silk. It is the only object in the station that speaks of something deliberately chosen for beauty rather than function. She counts them. One, two — she does it with a movement of the eyes, not the finger, the way experienced teachers count, who have long since learned that pointing singles people out and children do not always wish to be singled out. Ten. All present. They are the Olympic students. Ten pupils who have passed through the school stage, the district round, then the meritocracy of whitened exam papers and anonymous marking — the whole mechanism of national Olympiads designed to identify those capable of exceptional performance — and have arrived here, at the end of the line, on a May evening, with their rucksacks and their good shoes, to catch a train to a university city where they will be tested against students from the whole country. Mathematics, informatics, Romanian literature, chemistry — I do not ask yet. It does not matter yet. What matters is that they are here, and the platform is lit, and the air smells of new paint and the distant fields, and something is beginning. --- Through the window of his booth, the cashier sees them enter. He looks up — the first time in perhaps two hours — and watches the ten of them come in. Large rucksacks. Overlapping voices. One of them laughs at something and the laugh fills the station, an adolescent laugh, unrestrained, not knowing that other sounds exist. The cashier watches and something in his face thaws slightly, not a smile, something beneath a smile — that warmth you feel when you recognise something familiar in strangers. The age. The weight of the rucksack carried without feeling its weight. The good shoes put on specially. His grandson wore good shoes when he left. The cashier puts his hands back on the keyboard. He presses a few keys without purpose. He looks at the screen. The stationmaster, coming out again through his side door for his second circuit of the platform, sees them too. He stops for half a second — almost imperceptibly — at the end of the row of benches. He looks. The ten of them settle into their natural configuration, that alive and disorderly constellation of their age. The stationmaster continues walking. Hands behind his back. The usual step. But something in his shoulders has changed, a minimal relaxation, as though their presence has shifted the air pressure in the station by a measurable fraction. His daughter left with an orange rucksack. One of the boys on the bench has an orange rucksack. The stationmaster does not turn his head. --- And the teacher watches them too. But differently. She watches them the way she has watched them for years — with the eyes of someone who knows every tic, every fear hidden beneath a raised shoulder, every way in which each of them carries their uncertainty. The boy with glasses she has known for three years. He came to her in the first year of secondary school with a maths problem solved incorrectly, but with an intuition behind the error that was more interesting than the correct answers of the others. She stayed after class and explained to him why the intuition was valuable. He listened without saying anything. The next day he brought her a harder problem. She has no children of her own. This does not define her, though others have tried to define her through it. What defines her is the way she knows, without counting, that there are ten. Without pointing, that all of them are well. Without asking, that the boy with the large hoodie has not eaten since lunch — she knows it from the way he puts his hands in his pockets and looks sideways at the drinks machine in the corner, with the oblique glance of someone calculating whether they have change left. She has a packet of biscuits in her bag. She will bring it out on the bus, without fanfare, and place it on the seat between them as though she had simply left it there by accident. --- ## I prefer shorter summaries The conversation about phones begins the way all good conversations begin: from nothing in particular. The boy with the orange rucksack — not the one with glasses, the other one, the one in the large hoodie — holds up his phone and says something about memory. Five hundred and twelve gigabytes. He has had it a month. A gift. The girl next to him, the one who had photographed the mural, says she only has a hundred and twenty-eight and that it is enough for her. *"It's not enough for me,"* says the boy in the large hoodie. *"I filled half of it in the first week."* The boy with glasses leans across from the end of the bench. *"You know what I've noticed?"* he says. He does not wait to be asked. *"The more gigabytes you have on your phone, the less you can concentrate."* A pause. *"What do you mean?"* says the girl with the camera. *"I mean you have more on it. You have more on it, you have more to consume. You have more to consume, you never stop. You never stop, you can't sit with a long text. You barely get through eight hundred words and you're already looking for the summary."* A short silence. Not disagreement — recognition. The kind of silence that means *me too.* *"I read the summaries,"* admits the boy in the large hoodie, without apparent shame. *"I read the summaries before I watch the video. To know if it's worth my time."* *"But the summary was written by someone else,"* says the boy with glasses. *"Which means you're not reading any more. You're reading what someone else decided was important."* This lands differently. The silence is longer. Neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf has shown that deep reading creates a complex neuronal circuit in the brain that integrates language, memory, imagination and empathy. If reading is constantly replaced by rapid forms of information consumption, the cognitive circuit of deep reading becomes less active. The reward of the book is delayed — its meaning emerges often only after tens or hundreds of pages. The boy with glasses would not use these words. Instead he says: *"It's as if the phone fills all the space in advance. And when the long text comes, there's no room left. And you feel the text is the problem, that it's too long, that it's not good. But actually you've made the space smaller."* One of the other boys — quiet until now, with a real mathematics notebook on his knee, a spiral-bound notebook covered in blue-ink formulae, which means something, a real notebook on one's knee in 2025 — says that last week he tried to read an article of a thousand words. He had to read it three times. *"It wasn't difficult. My mind just wandered off on its own. Automatically. Without my wanting it to."* Attention deficit and reduced capacity for concentration are attributed to excessive mobile phone use by children and adolescents, with the scientific literature suggesting multiple negative consequences of smartphone use, beyond simply neglecting other activities and social isolation. The teacher, who has been listening without intervening, says something now. Quietly, in the voice she uses not when she is teaching but when she is thinking aloud: *"The text doesn't send you notifications."* She says it and falls silent. She does not explain. She does not need to. Studies show that deep reading develops creativity and activates the brain in ways that short clips and ultrarapid sequences, served by algorithms, cannot replicate. But that is not what they are hearing now. They are hearing something simpler and more uncomfortable: that they have become, without choosing to, dependent on solicitation. That a text which stays silent and waits for them to read it seems to them passive, sluggish, almost impolite. That the notification has become the basic unit of attention. The girl with the camera puts her phone down. Not dramatically. She puts it down and stares at nothing for a few seconds, as though testing how that feels. *"And you know what's worse?"* continues the boy with glasses. *"The more memory the phone has, the more you put on it. The more you put on it, the harder it is to leave it. Gigabytes aren't storage. They're chain."* Nobody laughs. Not because it is wrong, but because it is too precise. --- Through the window of his booth, the cashier has caught fragments of this. Not everything — the hum of the LED lights covers some words. But he has heard *gigabytes* and *can't read* and *summary.* He does not quite know what to do with it. His grandson sends him links sometimes — *look, grandfather, this is interesting* — and he opens the link and reads the first two sentences and closes it. Not because it doesn't interest him. Because the phone screen is small and the letters strain his eyes and because, somewhere in the middle of the second sentence, something else appears on the screen, an alert, and he loses the thread. And then he feels bad about losing it and does not open the link a second time. Perhaps that is what the boy with glasses means, thinks the cashier. Perhaps not only them. Perhaps him too. He puts his hands back on the keyboard and presses a few real keys, this time. --- The stationmaster has come out again. His third circuit. He walks more slowly than usual, or perhaps I am imagining this. He passes the group on the benches and, for a fraction of a second, turns his head. Not much. Enough to see them. The boy with the orange rucksack is gesturing, explaining something. The others are listening. The teacher — the pale blue scarf shifting slightly in the draught from the door to the platform — is listening too, her head tilted slightly to the left, the way someone listens when they are not evaluating but simply following. The stationmaster stops at the notice board. He adjusts something, a sheet of paper, an announcement. Or he pretends to adjust it. I cannot tell. The paprika stain is there on the lapel, orange in the LED light. His daughter left with an orange rucksack, yes. But before that she sat at the kitchen table and worked through problems, year after year, and he brought her tea without saying anything, without asking whether it was difficult, because he understood that to ask was to interrupt, and not interrupting was the only form of support he truly commanded. She won a prize at the chemistry Olympiad in her fifth year of school. He came to the ceremony in his work uniform because he had not had time to change. He applauded more loudly than all the other parents and did not realise it. He goes back through his door. A freight locomotive passes on the second track, without stopping, with a rumble that fills the station and disappears. Nobody startles. Not even the boy in the large hoodie. The freight locomotive is the only train that will pass through this station tonight. This is not sad. It is a fact. --- ## Then the teacher's phone rings. The ringtone is generic — the kind chosen by someone who does not think about ringtones. She answers, listens, and in her face something shifts: not alarm, but the particular adjustment of a person receiving news that changes the immediate logistics without altering the fundamental plan. She speaks briefly. Hangs up. *"Change of plan,"* she says, with the steadiness that teachers learn not from books but from years of things going wrong at inconvenient moments. *"We're not taking the train from here. We need to get to the bus — there's a connection from a town further along the route. The couchette train goes from there."* A breath moves through the group. Not quite protest. Not quite acceptance. The negotiating breath of adolescents processing an inconvenience. The boy in the large hoodie says: *"Where's the bus?"* *"Outside. Now."* They gather themselves — rucksacks hoisted, phones pocketed, the scattered constellation contracting back into a group with the speed that only a shared destination can produce. The girl with the camera takes one more photograph — this time of the LED ceiling, the new tiles, the empty platform — and I wonder what she sees in it. A document. A before. The last image of the place before the journey becomes something else. The teacher wraps her pale blue scarf more closely at the neck — the cool May air — and leads them towards the exit with the unhurried step of someone who knows exactly which bus, which connection, which train, because she has checked it three times and memorised it and carries it inside her the way the stationmaster carries the timetable: through long accumulation of care. They pass the cashier's window. The cashier looks up. He watches all ten of them, quickly, one by one, with the gaze of people who know that something is leaving and that departure is irreversible. Perhaps it is the grandson. Perhaps it is nobody in particular. Perhaps it is everyone who has ever passed through that window with a ticket in one hand and an open future in the other. He raises his hand — a small gesture, barely sketched, which I do not know if any of them noticed. They pass the mural with the locomotive, the hills, the governmental optimism. The doors open. The May evening receives them. --- I remain on the bench for a while. The stationmaster comes out one last time. He walks the platform with his hands behind his back. He stops at the buffers — the orange ones — and looks at the track that ends. He stands there a moment longer than is necessary to check anything. Then he turns and goes back inside, and the paprika stain disappears with him into the interior light. The cashier switches off his monitor. He takes his checked plastic bag. He puts on his coat. He passes by me without seeing me — or he sees me and chooses to say nothing, which is more courteous. He leaves through the back door. The station remains with me and the LED lights and the mural. Somewhere on the roads in the dark, a bus is moving towards a connecting town. Ten young people inside it, going towards a train. And now imagine what happens when they arrive and ask about the couchette. ## The couchette is not what they think it is. It is not a sleeping car, not that image from films with military-folded blankets and metal ladders and swaying lanterns. The couchette is, in reality, two compartments that are marginally less noisy than the rest of the ordinary carriage — numbered seats, doors that close, windows that do not open fully, an illusion of privacy purchased for a few extra lei above the standard open-carriage fare. That is all. No beds. No separate night. Just a slightly thicker wall between them and the din of the corridor. I imagine them when they discover this. The boy with glasses will look at the ticket, look at the compartment, look at the ticket again. He will say nothing. He will go in, put his rucksack in the rack, take out the spiral notebook. The boy in the large hoodie will laugh — that unrestrained laugh of his that had filled the station — and his laughter will be the correct answer, the only possible answer when confronted with a system that promises a couchette and delivers the relative quiet of a slightly thicker partition. The girl with the camera will photograph the compartment label. The teacher will take out the packet of biscuits and place it on the seat between them, without saying a word. There will be ten of them in a space that is neither sleeping car, nor salon, nor couchette in any sense they had imagined — simply a place with a door, slightly sheltered from the world. And it will be enough. Not because it is sufficient, but because they are young and young people have the capacity to transform insufficiency into sufficiency through a single ingredient the system can neither manufacture nor cancel: the presence of one another. They will talk. Perhaps about problems. Perhaps about phones and gigabytes and chains. Perhaps about nothing. The slightly thicker wall will hold out the noise of the corridor and in that small, insufficient, sufficient space, in the slow movement of the train through the Moldavian night, ten minds that have learned to sit with a long text will sit also with the silence between words, which is harder and rarer. The reward of deep reading is delayed. The meaning of a story, the understanding of an idea, the impact of a reflection — these emerge often only after tens or hundreds of pages. And of a journey. And of an empty platform on a May evening. And of a conversation between adolescents who discovered on their own what researchers have codified in studies: that the machine with more memory leaves them with less. The orange buffers are the last thing I see before I leave. Solid. Final. The track ends here. The couchette is not what they expected. And still they left. Perhaps that is all you need to know about them. --- *[Bibliography: Ryszard Kapuściński, "Travels with Herodotus" (2004); Ryszard Kapuściński, "The Emperor" (1978); Maryanne Wolf, "Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain" (2007); Nicholas Carr, "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains" (2010); Jonathan Haidt, "The Anxious Generation" (2024); Mark, G. (2023), "Attention Span", Hanover Square Press; Skowronek, J., Seifert, A. & Lindberg, S. (2023), "The mere presence of a smartphone reduces basal attentional performance", Scientific Reports, 13, 9363; Common Sense Media (2023), "The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens"; EU Kids Online (2020), European report on children's internet use aged 9–16; Romanian Ministry of Education, "Calendar of School Olympiads and Competitions 2024–2025", edu.ro; Pagina de Psihologie (2026), "The Paradox of Reading: Why We Read Less in a World with More Books than Ever"; HotNews.ro (2024), "How Much Time Do Romanian Children Spend in Front of Screens"; EDICT.ro (2024), "Mobile Phones and Children's Learning"; Vocativ.ro (2026), "How Young People Read in 2026".]* ---   ## **Author's Note** *On what is true, what is constructed, and what hides between them* --- **What is real** The platform exists. The provincial town exists — a Moldavian town at the end of a railway line, with a recently renovated station funded by European money, with new floor tiles and humming LED lights and a mural on the wall. The May evening exists. The May cold exists — that specific chill of a Moldavian night that has not yet decided between spring and summer, more penetrating than it should be. The bus exists. The night train exists. The couchette exists — and its absence of beds, that minor administrative deception which the national railway system practises without malice and without good intent, purely from the inertia of inherited nomenclature, exists with all its quietly disappointing concreteness. The school Olympiads exist, with their full mechanism of district stages and national phases and scholarships and calendars published late and amended through errata. The students who travel by bus and train to Olympiads exist — thousands of them each year, from small towns, with heavy rucksacks and good shoes and teachers who wear thin scarves and put biscuits on the bus seat without making a gesture of it. The conversation about gigabytes and concentration exists. Not this specific conversation, not these specific ten students, not these specific words — but the conversation, in its substance, in its logic, in the intuition of the boy with glasses who discovers on his own what researchers have codified in studies, this conversation takes place in every waiting room and bus and station in Romania and in the world where young people have time and poor signal and find themselves talking to one another. It is real in the most Kapuścińskian sense possible: composite, essentialised, truer than any single documented occurrence. The weather is real. The bus is real. The time of the evening is real. The stationmaster with the sauce stain is real in the sense that stationmasters with sauce stains on their lapels exist throughout Romania, and that a sauce stain on the uniform of a man who works alone is one of the most precise details a reporter who does not invent but selects can observe. The author's subjectivism is also real. And this, perhaps, is the only element about which the author had no doubt whatsoever. --- **Tensions and limits** The first thing to be said is that this text practises a selective honesty, which amounts to a form of controlled dishonesty. The cashier did not speak to me. The stationmaster did not tell me anything about his daughter. The teacher did not show me the packet of biscuits. Their interior consciousnesses — the thoughts about grandchildren, about children gone away, about families that might be theirs but are far — are narrative constructions based on probability and accumulated observation, not on direct testimony. Kapuściński himself called this *the deeper truth of the situation*, and it was simultaneously the best defence of his method and its greatest vulnerability. The central tension of the text is this: we claim to inhabit reality, but we construct it. We say *I saw*, but we see with eyes formed by our reading. We say *I felt the cold*, but the cold we describe has already passed through the filter of literature about cold. Witnesses who think — the formula that literary reportage claims for itself — are also witnesses who fabricate, inevitably. The critical distance we earn *after* immersion, as the manual prescribes, is itself a consoling fiction. The distance is always there. We bring it with us. Immersion tempers it; it does not remove it. The second tension: the students are constructed as heroes of concentration in a text that mourns the loss of concentration. There is an obvious didactic risk in this — the risk of making Olympiad students into too beautiful a symbol, too clean, the ideal counterpoint to a cultural diagnosis. The real lives of Romanian Olympiad students are more complicated: scholarships for prizes at competitions and Olympiads are awarded according to lists approved by ministerial order, and the criteria change from year to year, which means that intellectual performance is administered by a system whose rules are modified through errata. The Olympiad students are exceptional and, simultaneously, subject to the same institutional incoherence as everyone else. The text suggests this but never states it directly — and that is a choice, not an inadvertent omission. [Edupedu](https://www.edupedu.ro/lista-concursurile-si-olimpiadele-scolare-pentru-care-elevii-pot-primi-bursa-de-merit-sau-de-excelenta-in-anul-scolar-2024-2025-sunt-taiate-de-la-burse-rezultatele-elevilor-de-la-liceele-sportive-n/) The third tension: the couchette. The discovery that the *couchette train* means in practice two compartments marginally less noisy than the rest of the ordinary carriage is presented as a gentle revelation, an innocent absurdity of the system. But it is also something harder: it is the manner in which Romania honours its high-performing young people — with a ticket on a night train in which the word *couchette* is an inherited label for minimal comfort. The text chooses a gentle tone. It could have chosen an acid one. The choice of tone is also a moral position, even when we claim to be avoiding moralising. --- **Subjective errors** The author fell into the trap of beauty on several occasions. The sauce stain on the stationmaster's lapel is a detail too good, too precise, too *literary* to be neutral. Its selection is not innocent. The teacher's silk scarf — *the only object chosen for beauty rather than function* — is an interpretation, not an observation. The author decided that the scarf means this. The scarf confirmed nothing. The author projected entire biographies into a few gestures — the cashier's hands on the keyboard, the stationmaster's gaze towards the orange buffers — with a confidence that exceeds what direct observation can justify. This is the central vulnerability of literary reportage: the better you write, the more your fiction sounds like truth, and the harder it becomes to distinguish where seeing ended and inventing began. There is also a quiet sentimentality in the treatment of the three adults — the cashier, the stationmaster, the teacher — as figures of solitude and memory. It is entirely possible that the stationmaster is a perfectly contented man and thinks of nobody when he looks at the buffers. It is possible his daughter rings every evening. The author chose the sadder version because it served the text better. This is an acceptable form of literary dishonesty within the conventions of the genre, but it must be named. --- **The Aesopic language — hidden arguments** There are at least three concealed arguments in the structure of this text, which the author acknowledges and which are never stated directly. The first hidden argument: *The end of the line is not an accidental metaphor.* The Moldavian town at the end of the railway line is simultaneously a geographical terminus and a symbolic one — the terminus of a type of development, of a type of investment, of a type of attention that the state grants to the province. Average speeds on some major CFR routes remain below 60 km/h due to deferred maintenance and outdated signalling systems. The station renovated with European funds coexists with a system operating below capacity. The beauty of the new tiles and the hum of the LEDs are real and insufficient at the same time. The text does not say this. The text shows the beautiful station and falls silent. The silence is the argument. [International Trade Administration](https://www.trade.gov/market-intelligence/romania-railway-infrastructure-snapshot) The second hidden argument: *The couchette that is not a couchette is Romania.* Not as a crude, patriotically-critical metaphor, but as a precise mechanism: a system that inherits names without inheriting their contents, that offers promises calibrated to the honourable minimum and delivers below that minimum with perfect nonchalance. *Couchette* sounds well. It sounds like a reward for Olympiad students. It is neither reward nor punishment — it is simply what exists. The text presents this as gentle absurdity. The reader may decide for themselves whether it is gentle. The third hidden argument: *The conversation about gigabytes is not about phones.* It is about what institutions transmit when they form attention. The Olympiads require deep concentration. Digital platforms require fragmentation. The ten students live simultaneously in both systems and have arrived, through their own effort, at the ability to distinguish between them. The question the text never asks explicitly is: how many others have the same capacity? And why does the education system reward the ten while structurally ignoring the conditions that formed them? The hidden argument lies in the not-asking of the question. --- **Rhetorical tools** *The synecdoche detail* — the sauce stain represents solitude, the scarf represents choice, the orange rucksack represents departure. Each concrete object carries an abstract weight that the text never declares explicitly. *The triple portrait* — the cashier, the stationmaster, the teacher are constructed in parallel, each with their specific absence: the grandson, the daughter, the children she never had. The triad creates a structural echo that suggests all the adults in the station are bound by the same wound — separation — without the text ever saying so. *Telegraphic and breathing rhythm* — the alternation between short sentences, sometimes a single word (*The platform is empty. It is not sad. It is a fact.*) and long sentences with multiple subordination, physically mimics the rhythm of waiting: long periods of stillness, then an eruption of meaning. This is a direct Kapuścińskian technique and the author employs it without embarrassment and with full awareness that he is employing it. *The open ending through paradox* — *The couchette is not what they expected. And still they left.* This structure refuses resolution. It does not say it is good that they leave despite the disappointment. It does not say the disappointment matters. It leaves both truths in suspension, which is both an aesthetic choice and an ethical position: the world does not resolve itself in the final sentence. *Irony through juxtaposition* — the mural with the locomotive and the governmental optimism placed alongside the stationmaster with the sauce stain. The optimism is painted on the wall. Reality is on the lapel. The text does not comment on the juxtaposition. It shows it. *Silence as argument* — everything the text does not say about the real conditions of Olympiad students, about railway infrastructure, about the salaries of railway workers, about the migration of young people from Moldova — all of this is present in the structure of the text as deliberate absences. An attentive reader feels the weight of what is not said more than a page of direct social analysis would produce. --- **The slight hypocritical irony about Kapuściński** It must be said, with the honesty that an author's note requires, that writing *in the style of Kapuściński* is a contradiction in terms, and that the author has practised it with full awareness and a degree of hypocrisy he acknowledges with a smile. Kapuściński himself introduced himself with the line: "I am a poor reporter who unfortunately lacks the imagination of a writer." The critic Neal Ascherson likened him to Egon Erwin Kisch, considered the father of literary reportage, who dealt a death blow to traditional forms of reporting by putting the person of the reporter at centre stage. In other words: Kapuściński built a style precisely by refusing to imitate existing styles. To imitate Kapuściński's style is to do exactly what he refused to do. It is rather like winning an originality competition with a copy. [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryszard_Kapu%C5%9Bci%C5%84ski) Furthermore: Kapuściński was defended by his biographer Domosławski on the grounds that his reportage, although it contained elements of fiction — altered characters, rearranged details, reconstructed dialogues — was more faithful to the spirit of reality than conventional reporting. "Instinctively, you can write things that capture the spirit of the moment," Domosławski said. "You have to use real ingredients; you can't make things up." The present text has used real ingredients and constructed from them a composite scene. To what extent this is Kapuściński and to what extent it is a simulation of Kapuściński — this question remains open and the author will not close it, because to close it would be simultaneously more Kapuścińskian and more dishonest. [Frontline Club](https://www.frontlineclub.com/ryszard_kapuscinski_where_does_journalism_end_and_literature_begin/) The hypocritical irony consists in this: the more conscious you are of the method's limits, the better you write within the method. The self-awareness of the writing — the naming of tools, the acknowledging of hidden arguments, the declaring of tensions — is itself a rhetorical technique. This author's note is itself a construction. And the fact that I say so does not make it any less a construction. The only non-rhetorical element in the entire text is the cold of the May evening. That was real.