Travel Writing

I just finished Paul Theroux's 'Ghost Train to the Eastern Star', my first foray into travel reading. It took me mostly every moment of my eight months in D.C. to finish the book, reading a few paragraphs here and a few lines there, almost always in bed right before falling asleep and almost always as 'Project Runway' or 'The Next Food Network Star' was murmuring in the background.

The book found me by accident. Elise's aunt and uncle were having a garage sale right before their move from Maryland and, lacking anything to read, I saved the book from a pile of similar travelogues destined for fates unknown. Perhaps, it might have found a reader more appreciative than I. Who knows? (We also saved a Nintendo Wii and a doilies that used to belong to Elise's grandmother.)

I wasn't reading anything and hadn't for awhile. My time to read for pleasure is so minute, as I mentioned, literally but a few minutes every night, that I can never decide what to fill that time with. When I go to the book store, I can never decide what to read because it is such a huge commitment. Knowing I am going to be reading this book for...say, the next eight months...means that it better be pretty good.
I put so much weight on the decision, I usually end up not getting anything at all and returning home empty-handed.

When I started the book, I found it incredibly self-indulgent (much like blog-writing!) I had the impression that the author was saying, "Look at all these wonderful places I get to go, while you have to stay home and just read about it." My impression changed as I became legitimately interested in the places he was travelling through: the 'Stans, India, Vietnam. I was drawn in. Only to be spit back out soon thereafter, a vile taste in my mouth.

See, when talking about a place, the author's needle seemed to start in a place already tainted and muddled. That was how he was introduced to a place, seeing everything that was wrong with it first. If his needle moved off the negative, it was only after he met and talked with the people whose everyday lives occupied the
place. I never want to be introduced to a new place coming from a place of negativity. Of course I realize there is poverty and strife and overcrowding in our world and that we may very well be on a path of slow decay, but I never want to lose the wonder of seeing new places and meeting new people or lose the sense that
the slow decay can be slowed or stopped. I think if you come to a new place with your needle stuck on the negative, you've already lost because it is so much easier to find what is wrong with a thing that what is right with it.

He even concludes the book on a somber note: "It's true that travel is the saddest of pleasures, the long-distance overland blues. But I also thought that what I'd kept fretting about throughout my trip, like a mantra of vexation building in my head, words I never wrote. Most people on earth are poor. Most places are blighted and nothing will stop the blight from getting worse. Travel gives you glimpses of the past and of the future, your own and other people's....But there are too many people and an enormous number of them spend their hungry days thinking about America as the Mother Ship....Most of the world is worsening, shrinking to a ball of bungled desolation. Only the old can really see how gracelessly the world is aging and all that we have lost. Politicians are always inferior to their citizens. No one on earth is well governed. Is there hope? Yes. Most people I'd met, in chance encounters, were strangers who helped me on my way...."

Seriously? If travel is the saddest of pleasures, stay home. No one made you take a train from England, through Eastern Europe, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, fly to India, fly to Sri Lanka, train again through Burma, Thailand, Singapore, Cambodia, Vietnam, Japan, finding yourself depressed, hungry and cold on the Trans-Siberian Express. And who frets on a trip? Besides my dad? Evidently, this guy. Many places are blighted but there IS something that we can do about it.

I think this analysis is appropriate given where we are in our lives, on the precipice of beginning our own travels. We have the additional benefit of getting to live in a place, not just whizz through it on rail, seeing little through the grimy portal or much beyond the immediate neighborhood of the station. There will always be something wrong. These things will be easy to find. This is part of my new job. To move mountains pebble by pebble. But there will also be things that are very right. These things will be much more elusive, but when found, that much more rewarding, like a four-leaf clover, like a beautiful pair of peep-toe wedges in the Nordstrom shoe department, deeply discounted.

There is a picture on this blog of Sam's expression the first time he saw snow at his grandparents' house. It is, arguably, the best picture on a blog that is going into its fourth year. Sam is in a transitional point in his life (when won't he be?), a point where is emotional exuberance and intellectual restraint collide, then meld, forging the young man he will become. We're all kind of here, too, I think.
Even--or especially--Pete who is just happy to be along for the ride. For us all, it will be important to never forget this expression and what it means. It is unfortunate that Mr. Theroux has lost this sense of wonder, though his loss can be our gain.

All this being said, I think I'm going to go back to reading things more along the lines of Harry Potter.