Paul Theroux - Ghost train to the Eastern star : on the tracks of the great railway bazaar

Paul Theroux

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON NEW YORK
2008

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 peoples privacybeing actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders. The traveler is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the travelers personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption, and mythomania bordering on the pathological. This is why a travelers 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, its much harder to stay at home and be polite to people and face things, but wheres the book in that? Better the boastful charade of pretending to be an adventurer:

Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the focsle
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 dont belong; yet I am floating, an idle anonymous visitor among busy people, an utter stranger. When youre 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 invisiblethe usual condition of the older traveleris much more useful than being obvious. You see more, you are not interrupted, you are ignored. Such a traveler isnt in a hurry, which is why you might mistake him for a bum. Hating schedules, depending on chance encounters, I am attracted by travels slow tempo.

Ghosts have all the time in the world, another pleasure of long-distance aimlessnesstraveling 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 Id gone overland, changing trains across Asia, improvising my trip, rubbing against the world. And reflecting on what Id seenthe 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 cafe, or some angry boys armed with rusty spears shrieking, Run you life, dim-dim! or the sound of a train at night, striking 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.