Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads

by Paul Theroux

THE OLD MAN twisted and flowed, ancient but ageless and unstoppable. Take it for granted and it may fool you, dam it and it will flood you, ride it and beware of its fickle flotation, study it wisely and don’t make the mistake of believing that its surface—whether placid or turbulent—reveals the depths of its inner state. After a certain year, old is just old, indefinable. But oldness is also a sort of psychic weight, the accumulation of experience, which is why for the old nothing is shocking except the obvious repetition of human stupidity, and very little is new. All your electronics are toys. But it is not only the young who contrive to make you feel elderly, boasting of their toys, how cleverly they manipulate them; some older people connive at it too, as though in resignation, surrendering to bafflement, to expiate some fear or deficiency in themselves. Travel has always been my way of defeating this sinking feeling, partly because travel is a form of escape, and travel itself—the elemental farewell—becomes the fugitive fantasy of a new life, travel inspiring a sense of hope. I began my real life, my life of intensity and solitude and discovery, as a twenty-two-year-old traveler in Africa, then elsewhere, everywhere, and that formed me as a writer, alert to every sound and smell and to the pulses of the air. At last, in old age, I came back.