charm and character that, even though they are only there for a short time and never once turn and look at you, never offer a remark, you have no choice but to fall hopelessly in love with them, with everything about them, with their luggage even. And when they get up and leave, it is as if you had lost an arm or a leg.
Accidents, misdirections, overexcitement, heat, crowds,and heartbreaking delays you must expect when you go on a journey, just as you expect to have dreams at night. Whether or not you enjoy yourself at all depends on your state of mind. The man who travels with everything he owns, books, clothes for every season, shoe trees, a dinner jacket, medicines, binoculars, magazines, and telephone numbers—the unwilling traveler—and the man who leaves each place in turn without reluctance, with no desire ever to come back, obviously cannot be making the same journey, even though their tickets are identical. The same thing holds good for the woman who was once beautiful and who now has to resort to movement, change, continuous packing and unpacking, in order to avoid the reality that awaits her in the smallest mirror. And for the ambitious young man who by a too constant shifting around has lost all of his possessions, including his native accent and the ability to identify himself with a particular kind of sky or the sound, let us say, of windmills creaking; so that in New Mexico his talk reflects Bermuda, and in Bermuda it is again and again of Barbados that he is reminded, but never of Iowa or Wisconsin or Indiana, never of home.
Though people usually have long complicated tickets which they expect the conductor to take from them in due time, the fact is that you don’t need to bother with a ticket at all. If you are willing to travel lightly, you can also dispense with the train. Cars and trucks are continually stopping at filling stations and at corners where there is an overhead stop light. By jerking your thumb you will almost certainly get a ride to the next town of more than two thousand inhabitants where (chances are) you will manage to get something to eat and a place to sleep for a night or so, even if it’s only the county jail.
The appointment you have made to meet somebody at such and such a day at noon on the steps of the courthouse atAmarillo, Texas, you may have to forget. Especially if you go too long without food or with nothing but stolen ripe tomatoes, so that suddenly you are not sure of what you are saying. Or if the heat gets you, and when you wake up you are in a hospital ward. But after you start to get well again and are able to sit up a short while each day, there will be time to begin thinking about where you will go next. And if you like, you can always make new appointments.
The great, the universal problem is how to be always on a journey and yet see what you would see if it were only possible for you to stay home: a black cat in a garden, moving through iris blades behind a lilac bush. How to keep sufficiently detached and quiet inside so that when the cat in one spring reaches the top of the garden wall, turns down again, and disappears, you will see and remember it, and not be absorbed at that moment in the dryness of your hands.
If you missed that particular cat jumping over one out of so many garden walls, it ought not to matter, but it does apparently. The cat seems to be everything. Seeing clearly is everything. Being certain as to smells, being able to remember sounds and to distinguish by touch one object, one body, from another. And it is not enough to see the fishermen drawing in their wide circular net, the tropical villages lying against a shelf of palm trees, or the double rainbow over Fort-de-France. You must somehow contrive, if only for a week or only overnight, to live in the houses of people, so that at least you know the elementary things—which doors sometimes bang when a sudden wind springs up; where the telephone book is kept; and how their lungs feel
Accidents, misdirections, overexcitement, heat, crowds,and heartbreaking delays you must expect when you go on a journey, just as you expect to have dreams at night. Whether or not you enjoy yourself at all depends on your state of mind. The man who travels with everything he owns, books, clothes for every season, shoe trees, a dinner jacket, medicines, binoculars, magazines, and telephone numbers—the unwilling traveler—and the man who leaves each place in turn without reluctance, with no desire ever to come back, obviously cannot be making the same journey, even though their tickets are identical. The same thing holds good for the woman who was once beautiful and who now has to resort to movement, change, continuous packing and unpacking, in order to avoid the reality that awaits her in the smallest mirror. And for the ambitious young man who by a too constant shifting around has lost all of his possessions, including his native accent and the ability to identify himself with a particular kind of sky or the sound, let us say, of windmills creaking; so that in New Mexico his talk reflects Bermuda, and in Bermuda it is again and again of Barbados that he is reminded, but never of Iowa or Wisconsin or Indiana, never of home.
Though people usually have long complicated tickets which they expect the conductor to take from them in due time, the fact is that you don’t need to bother with a ticket at all. If you are willing to travel lightly, you can also dispense with the train. Cars and trucks are continually stopping at filling stations and at corners where there is an overhead stop light. By jerking your thumb you will almost certainly get a ride to the next town of more than two thousand inhabitants where (chances are) you will manage to get something to eat and a place to sleep for a night or so, even if it’s only the county jail.
The appointment you have made to meet somebody at such and such a day at noon on the steps of the courthouse atAmarillo, Texas, you may have to forget. Especially if you go too long without food or with nothing but stolen ripe tomatoes, so that suddenly you are not sure of what you are saying. Or if the heat gets you, and when you wake up you are in a hospital ward. But after you start to get well again and are able to sit up a short while each day, there will be time to begin thinking about where you will go next. And if you like, you can always make new appointments.
The great, the universal problem is how to be always on a journey and yet see what you would see if it were only possible for you to stay home: a black cat in a garden, moving through iris blades behind a lilac bush. How to keep sufficiently detached and quiet inside so that when the cat in one spring reaches the top of the garden wall, turns down again, and disappears, you will see and remember it, and not be absorbed at that moment in the dryness of your hands.
If you missed that particular cat jumping over one out of so many garden walls, it ought not to matter, but it does apparently. The cat seems to be everything. Seeing clearly is everything. Being certain as to smells, being able to remember sounds and to distinguish by touch one object, one body, from another. And it is not enough to see the fishermen drawing in their wide circular net, the tropical villages lying against a shelf of palm trees, or the double rainbow over Fort-de-France. You must somehow contrive, if only for a week or only overnight, to live in the houses of people, so that at least you know the elementary things—which doors sometimes bang when a sudden wind springs up; where the telephone book is kept; and how their lungs feel
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