A pleasure I have not indulged in enough this past year is reading. Books are one of my most familiar old friends.
On airplanes and buses, as I hop between seven countries this trip, I have been trying my best to make up for this. My father is an avid reader. I remember as a little girl going into his office and navigating a corridor of book and magazine piles to reach him. Behind him were shelves that stretched the entirety of his office wall lines with books. The furnace room became a second library when the first did not suffice. The titles varied but among them are two decades worth of National Geographic magazines, books of history, science, languages, travel, and mountaineering. I remember just marveling at the books, lined up in a row with their personalities being the font and colour. Upon completion he’d sign the inside cover with the date. Many of those books have been read multiple times. His recollection for titles is astounding. I asked for three books and he gave me the synopsis ones he thoroughly enjoyed.
One of them has kept me preoccupied for much of this trip and I would love to share some of it with you.
Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography to oblivion.
But a travel book is the opposite, the loner bouncing back bigger than life to tell the story of his experiment with space. It is the simplest sort of narrative, an explanation which is its own excuse for the gathering up and the going. It is motion given order by its repetition in words. That sort of disappearnce is elemental, but few come back silent.
The journey, not the arrival, matters; the voyage, not the landing.
The Old Patagonian Express: By train through the Americas. Paul Theroux
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