After a few weeks, the accumulating debt owed to sleep, the darkness coming to dominate mornings and evenings (and, just ahead, the sharp plunge into commuting night as we leave British Summer Time), the first of the early morning ice … before you know it, you’re commuting in a state that moves with ease between sleep and wake. (I remember that practical criticism exercise from Homage to Catalonia, chapter 3.) Now, some days in to what will be a fairly busy half-term of work, body and mind have started to feel like my own once more.
Matt's right about commuting. And yet ….
… the feeling of sharing a way of life with all those who travel with you, and of recognising yourself as belonging to the large, diverse community thronging the platforms around you is, I believe, a vital part of our everyday lives. The experience of mingling and sharing is the social glue which holds us all together and tells us — there is no need to be afraid. ... Each day the British newspapers are full of alarming stories about the breakdown of society — the chaos and danger outside our front door. But that is not how I feel as I travel to and from work. … Each improvement that is made to public transport, encouraging more of us to use it regularly, sustains and broadens that feeling of community I cherish. Being surrounded by other people focussing on their own lives, brings moments of understanding ... there is no hostile mob or masses ranged against us, undermining our standards and values, roaming the streets, threatening us with their dumbed-down mass culture and mass entertainment. Rather what I see is other people like myself, reading, talking or looking around them. And just as often I feel I see them reflecting, facing surprisingly similar worries to mine — concerned about the speed of change, struggling to keep pace, hoping that we can explain all we are learning to the next generation. We are all, I recognise, "the masses". We are all in this together. — Lisa Jardine
Another, priceless gain: reading. I read a lot on the train and what I read sometimes acts as a significant thread, weaving itself in with the rest of what’s happening, even uniting what could be distinct, almost discrete experiences of city and country. Being on the train proves to be a social, meditative time, given over to thinking and reflection.
Just lately, reading Calvino has been perfect, particularly as I grew tired and found myself drifting in and out of sleep and observation — Calvino’s words and my own thoughts coming together until reading him became something very intimate.
The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls. …
You walk for days among trees and among stones. … trees and stones are only what they are.
Finally the journey leads to the city of Tamara. You penetrate it along streets thick with signboards jutting from the walls. The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things … Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages: the city says everything you must think, makes you repeat her discourse, and while you believe you are visiting Tamara you are only recording the names with which she defines herself and all her arts.
However the city may really be, beneath this thick coating of signs, whatever it may contain or conceal, you leave Tamara without having discovered it. Outside, the land stretches, empty, to the horizon; the sky opens, with speeding clouds. In the shape that chance and wind give the clouds, you are already intent on recognising figures: a sailing ship, a hand, an elephant …
Each city receives its form from the desert it opposes …
The city is redundant: it repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind. … Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.
And,
… what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveller’s past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.
