You think of travelers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the
laziest ways on earth of passing the time. Travel is not merely the business
of being bone-idle, but also an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call
attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude upon
other people's privacy — being actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders. The
traveler is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part
of the traveler's personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption, and
mythomania bordering on the pathological. This is why a traveler's worst
nightmare is not the secret police or the witch doctors or malaria, but rather
the prospect of meeting another traveler.
Most writing about travel takes the form of jumping to conclusions,
and so most travel books are superfluous, the thinnest, most transparent
monologuing. Little better than a license to bore, travel writing is the lowest
form of literary self-indulgence: dishonest complaining, creative mendacity,
pointless heroics, and chronic posturing, much of it distorted with
Munchausen syndrome.
Of course, it's much harder to stay at home and be polite to
people and face things, but where's the book in that? Better the boastful
charade of pretending to be an adventurer:
Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo'c'sle
Stubbly with goodness,
in a lusty "Look-at-me!" in exotic landscapes.
This was more or less my mood as I was packing to leave home. I
also thought: But there is curiosity. Even the most timid fantasists need the
satisfaction of now and then enacting their fantasies. And sometimes you
just have to clear out. Trespassing is a pleasure for some of us. As for
idleness, "An aimless joy is a pure joy."
And there are dreams: one, the dream of a foreign land that I
enjoy at home, staring east into space at imagined temples, crowded
bazaars, and what V. S. Pritchett called "human architecture," lovely women
in gauzy clothes, old trains clattering on mountainsides, the mirage of
happiness; two, the dream state of travel itself. Often on a trip, I seem to be
alive in a hallucinatory vision of difference, the highly colored unreality of
foreignness, where I am vividly aware (as in most dreams) that I don't belong;
yet I am floating, an idle anonymous visitor among busy people, an utter
stranger. When you're strange, as the song goes, no one remembers your
name.
Travel can induce such a distinct and nameless feeling of
strangeness and disconnection in me that I feel insubstantial, like a puff of
smoke, merely a ghost, a creepy revenant from the underworld, unobserved
and watchful among real people, wandering, listening while remaining
unseen. Being invisible — the usual condition of the older traveler — is much
more useful than being obvious. You see more, you are not interrupted, you
are ignored. Such a traveler isn't in a hurry, which is why you might mistake
him for a bum. Hating schedules, depending on chance encounters, I am
attracted by travel's slow tempo.
Ghosts have all the time in the world, another pleasure of long-
distance aimlessness — traveling at half speed on slow trains and
procrastinating. And this ghostliness, I was to find, was also an effect of the
journey I had chosen, returning to places I had known many years ago. It is
almost impossible to return to an early scene in your traveling life and not feel
like a specter. And many places I saw were themselves sad and spectral,
others big and hectic, while I was the haunting presence, the eavesdropping
shadow on the ghost train.
Long after I took the trip I wrote about in The Great Railway Bazaar I went on
thinking how I'd gone overland, changing trains across Asia, improvising my
trip, rubbing against the world. And reflecting on what I'd seen — the way the
unrevisited past is always looping in your dreams. Memory is a ghost train
too. Ages later, you still ponder the beautiful face you once glimpsed in a
distant country. Or the sight of a noble tree, or a country road, or a happy
table in a café, or some angry boys armed with rusty spears shrieking, "Run
you life, dim-dim!" — or the sound of a train at night, sounding that precise
musical note of train whistles, a diminished third, into the darkness, as you
lie in the train, moving through the world as travelers do, "inside the whale."
Thirty-three years went by. I was then twice as old as the person
who had ridden those trains, most of them pulled by steam locomotives,
boiling across the hinterland of Turkey and India. I loved the symmetry in the
time difference. Time passing had become something serious to me,
embodied in the process of my growing old. As a young man I regarded the
earth as a fixed and trustworthy thing that would see me into my old age; but
older, I began to understand transformation as a natural law, something
emotional in an undependable world that was visibly spoiled. It is only with
age that you acquire the gift to evaluate decay, the epiphany of Wordsworth,
the wisdom of wabi-sabi: nothing is perfect, nothing is complete, nothing
lasts.
"Without change there can be no nostalgia," a friend once said to
me, and I realized that what I began to witness was not just change and
decay, but imminent extinction. Had my long-ago itinerary changed as much
as me? I had the idea of taking the same trip again, traveling in my own
footsteps — a serious enterprise, but the sort of trip that younger,
opportunistic punks often take to make a book and get famous. (The list is
very long and includes travelers' books in the footsteps of Graham Greene,
George Orwell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Leonard Woolf, Joseph Conrad,
Mister Kurtz, H. M. Stanley, Leopold Bloom, Saint Paul, Basho, Jesus, and
Buddha.)
The best of travel seems to exist outside of time, as though the
years of travel are not deducted from your life. Travel also holds the magical
possibility of reinvention: that you might find a place you love, to begin a new
life and never go home. In a distant place no one knows you — nearly always
a plus. And you can pretend, in travel, to be different from the person you are,
unattached, enigmatic, younger, richer or poorer, anyone you choose to be,
the rebirth that many travelers experience if they go far enough.
The decision to return to any early scene in your life is dangerous
but irresistible, not as a search for lost time but for the grotesquerie of what
happened since. In most cases it is like meeting an old lover years later and
hardly recognizing the object of desire in this funny-looking and bruised old
fruit. We all live with fantasies of transformation. Live long enough and you
see them enacted — the young made old, the road improved, houses where
there were once fields; and their opposites, a good school turned into a ruin,
a river poisoned, a pond shrunk and filled with trash, and dismal
reports: "He's dead," "She's huge," "She committed suicide," "He's now prime
minister," "He's in jail," "You can't go there anymore."
A great satisfaction in growing old — one of many — is assuming
the role of a witness to the wobbling of the world and seeing irreversible
changes. The downside, besides the tedium of listening to the delusions of
the young, is hearing the same hackneyed opinions over and over, not just
those of callow youth but, much worse and seemingly criminal, the opinions
of even callower people who ought to know better, all the lies about war and
fear and progress and the enemy — the world as a wheel of repetition.
They — I should say "we" — are bored by things we've heard a million times
before, books we've dismissed, the discoveries that are not new, the
proposed solutions that will solve nothing. "I can tell that I am growing old,"
says the narrator in Borges's story "The Congress." "One unmistakable sign
is the fact that I find novelty neither interesting nor surprising, perhaps
because I see nothing essentially new in it — it's little more than timid
variations on what's already been."
Older people are perceived as cynics and misanthropes — but no,
they are simply people who have at last heard the still, sad music of
humanity played by an inferior rock band howling for fame. Going back and
retracing my footsteps — a glib, debunking effort for a shallower, younger,
impressionable writer — would be for me a way of seeing who I was, where I
went, and what subsequently happened to the places I had seen.
Since I will never write the autobiography I once envisioned —
volume one, Who I Was; volume two, I Told You So — writing about travel
has become a way of making sense of my life, the nearest I will come to
autobiography — as the novel is, the short story, and the essay. As Pedro
Almodóvar once remarked, "Anything that is not autobiography is plagiarism."
The thing to avoid while in my own footsteps would be the tedious
reminiscences of better days, the twittering of the nostalgia bore, whose
message is usually I was there and you weren't. "I remember when you could
get four of those for a dollar." "There was a big tree in a field where that
building is now." "In my day . . ."
Oh, shut up!
Continues...
Excerpted from Ghost Train to the Eastern Star by Paul Theroux Copyright © 2008 by Paul Theroux. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.