A stranger on the train

I was travelling from Madrid to Seville last Friday. The high-speed train was almost empty, which surprised me. I had a whole row to myself. About twenty minutes after we left the station, an older man sat opposite me. He looked tired. He took a small notebook out of his bag and started writing. He wrote for an hour without stopping. I was curious. When he stood up to get a coffee, I tried not to look at the notebook, but I could see it from where I was sitting. He was not writing in any language I knew. The letters were strange and beautiful. When he came back, he noticed I had seen the notebook. He smiled. 'Don't worry,' he said in Spanish, 'it's a language I have invented myself. I have been working on it for thirty years.' I asked him why. He thought for a moment and then answered: 'Because no language can express everything you feel. So I tried to make one that could.' I am still thinking about him.