The school holiday is over. Quiet, which like a totalitarian despot ruled unchallenged for six weeks has, in a violent uprising, been overthrown. The changeover, or, more aptly, takeover, has been swift and ruthless. Members of this new youth order stand collected in misshapen pockets that continue to change form as they eddy and whirl about one another.

Discussion is in the air. Several discussions, as a matter of fact, all simultaneous. If this were a formal meeting in a formal room, the usually nicely-coiffed elegantly-groomed personal secretary in charge of minute-taking would be seriously challenged.

How many hands and ears must one have to keep pace with and record this plethora of utterances: “You’re such a liar.” “Serious, believe me.” “A shark?” “Yah.” “A shark nearly got you?” “Yah. It got my surfboard.” “Yeah, whatever.”

And within the same group, a cross conversation, on hairstyle: “I so wanted braids so I got them in Bali. What you reckon?”

“Awesome. Did the package include highlights as well or was that extra? Because like the place near where I live, you know the one where they say Pink gets her hair done when she visits? Yeah, like they charge you for braids and you like pay for anything else you want like highlights.”

And running, like a cycle spoke through those two conversations, a third one that, like a nectar-starved bee invading as many flowers as it can in the space of a short minute, ranges from video games to downloaded movies to midnight visits to the burger franchise to late night swims in a friend’s pool.

No, it would be impossible to record minutes of such a meeting. The only minutes being recorded here on the train station are on the monitor board, which informs everybody, in the typical un-arbitrary manner of time, that a train is due in seven minutes.

One of the subjugated members of the old order, an elderly gentleman, is seated on a hexagonal cement bench fashioned around one of the pillars. He has for these last weeks been spotted seated on the same bench, same time, waiting for the 7.52 to the city. His head is bowed. Not in an act of submission seeing as the platform is swarming now with youngsters loosely termed as school-goers, several already plotting strategic detours that will see their journeys terminate at anywhere else but school; this, apparently, is a condition or a syndrome related to ‘firstdayitis’.

Weighty matters of knowledge

The elderly man appears overpowered with what is in his lap. A weighty book. A book so hefty it could serve as a useful weapon. Many a teacher in the past, in the day when the rod ruled the roost, must have coveted such a tome if only to prove to young upstarts in the classroom that scoffed at the opportunity to learn how weighty indeed is knowledge.

The man with the book alone appears to be oblivious to all that is going on around. The book, set in another place and a time that’s long passed by — England and the 1700s — is about adulation, reverence and friendship between two persons thirty years apart in age. It is a printed monument of hero-worship and respect. It is Boswell’s biography of Dr. Samuel Johnson, a book that is apparently by common consent agreed to be the best biography ever written.

Idly as he flips a page the man pauses to wonder whether any of the young ones waiting for their train on the station will ever one day pick up this book. Will its daunting size put them off? In the present age of fragmented attention and free availability of nearly everything will the abundance of choice diminish a thirst for focus? For picking up one book and reading it through? And so he wonders, as the train rolls in, a quiet modern symbol telling him it is indeed time to arise and put the past away.

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.