The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia

by Paul Theroux

decided that travel was flight and pursuit in equal parts,

the conceit of the long-distance traveler is the belief that he is going so far, he will be alone—inconceivable that another person has the same good idea.

“One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it’s left behind,”

Money pulls the Iranian in one direction, religion drags him in another, and the result is a stupid starved creature for whom woman is only meat.

The railway was a fictor’s bazaar, in which anyone with the patience could carry away a memory to pore over in privacy.

It must be a sociological fact that prejudice is a more common motive for emigration than poverty, but what interested me about these three was that they were, like so many others, going to Australia the cheapest way, via Afghanistan and India, living like the poorest they were among, eating vile food, and sleeping in bug-ridden hotel rooms, because they were rejecting a society they saw to be in decay.

“Hunger is the handmaid of genius,” says the Pudd’nhead Wilson epigraph above one of the Bombay chapters in Mark Twain’s Following the Equator,

Train travel animated my imagination and usually gave me the solitude to order and write my thoughts: I traveled easily in two directions, along the level rails while Asia flashed changes at the window, and at the interior rim of a private world of memory and language. I cannot imagine a luckier combination.

hurry into a doomed plane or step into the path of a bullet? It is ignominious when a person travels a great distance to die.

but Bangkok, whose discomfort seems a calculated discouragement to residents, is a city for transients.

Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation; and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.

perhaps it was the deceived hesitation I had called patience,

A colonial confection, like one of those French dishes that take ages to prepare and are devoured swiftly: a brief delicacy that is mostly labor and memory.

Anyway, people don’t always see the same things in foreign countries. I’ve got a theory that what you hear influences—maybe even determines—what you see. An ordinary street can be transformed by a scream. Or a smell might make a horrible place attractive. Or you might see a great Moghul tomb and while you’re watching it you’ll hear someone say ‘chickenzola’ or ‘mousehole’ and the whole tomb will seem as if it’s made out of paste—”

“Boys, be ambitious. Be ambitious not for money, not for selfish aggrandizement, not for the evanescent thing which men call fame. Be ambitious for the attainment of all that a man ought to be.”

The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.

To see this population density is to conclude that overcrowding requires good manners; any disturbance, anything less than perfect order, would send it sprawling.

Kyoto I filed away for a return journey. Kyoto was like a wine bottle whose label you memorize to assure some future happiness.

But he does not know—how could he?—that the scenes changing in the train window from Victoria Station to Tokyo Central are nothing compared to the change in himself; and travel writing, which cannot but be droll at the outset, moves from journalism to fiction, arriving as promptly as the Kodama Echo at autobiography. From there any further travel makes a beeline to confession, the embarrassed monologue in a deserted bazaar.

And I had learned what I had always secretly believed, that the difference between travel writing and fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows.

“Life Without Principle,”

“My purpose in making this wonderful journey is not to delude myself but to discover myself in the objects I see,”

Goethe wrote in his Italian Journey. “Nothing, above all, is comparable to the new life that a reflective person experiences when he observes a new country. Though I am still always myself, I believe I have been changed to the very marrow of my bones.”

“All the hungers of life are blankly stated there,” the English writer and traveler V. S. Pritchett wrote about Spain fifty years ago.

All solitary travel offers a sort of special license allowing you to be anyone you want to be.

because travel into the unknown can also be like dying. After the anguish of the goodbyes and the departure itself, you seem to diminish, growing smaller and smaller, vanishing into the distance. In time, no one misses you except in the casual, mildly mocking way of “Whatever happened to old so-and-so, who threatened to beetle off to Africa?” You’re gone, no one can depend on you, and when you’re only a dim memory, a bitterness creeps into the recollection,