The Tao of Travel

Looking across the river, I realized I was looking towards another continent, another country, another world. There were sounds there—music, and not only music but the pip and honk of voices and cars. The frontier was actual: people do things differently there, and looking hard I could see trees outlined by the neon beer signs, a traffic jam, the source of the music. No people, but cars and trucks were evidence of them. Beyond that, past the Mexican city of Nuevo Laredo, was a black slope, the featureless, night-haunted republics of Latin America.—

OPE

A person who has not crossed an African border on foot has not really entered the country, for the airport in the capital is no more than a confidence trick; the distant border, what appears to be the edge, is the country's central reality.—

DSS

Air Travel

There is not much to say about airplane journeys. Anything remarkable must be disastrous, so you define a good flight by negatives: you didn't get hijacked, you didn't crash, you didn't throw up, you weren't late, you weren't nauseated by the food. So you are grateful. The gratitude brings such relief your mind goes blank, which is appropriate, for the airplane passenger is a time traveler. He crawls into a carpeted tube that is reeking of disinfectant; he is strapped in to go home, or away. Time is truncated, or in any case warped: he leaves in one time zone and emerges in another. And from the moment he steps into the tube and braces his knees on the seat in front, uncomfortably upright—from the moment he departs, his mind is focused on arrival. That is, if he has any sense at all. If he looked out of the window he would see nothing but the tundra of the cloud layer, and above is empty space. Time

is brilliantly blinded: there is nothing to see. This is the reason so many people are apologetic about taking planes. They say, "What I'd really like to do is forget these plastic jumbos and get a three-masted schooner and just stand there on the poop deck with the wind in my hair."—

OPE

Airplanes have dulled and desensitized us; we are encumbered, like lovers in a suit of armor.—

OPE

Airplanes are a distortion of time and space. And you get frisked.—

GTES

Air travel is very simple and annoying and a cause of anxiety. It is like being at the dentist's, even to the chairs.—

FAF

A train journey is travel; everything else—planes especially—is transfer, your journey beginning when the plane lands.—

GRB

The Return Journey