Paul Theroux
A great satisfaction in growing old - one of many - is assuming the role of a witness to the wobbling of the world and seeing irreversible changes. The downside, besides the tedium of listening to the delusions of the young, is hearing the same hackneyed opinions over and over, not just those of callow youth but, much worse and seemingly criminal, the opinions of even callower people who ought to know better, all the lies about war and fear and progress and the enemy - the world as a wheel of repetition. - “I can tell that I am growing old,” says the narrator in Borges’s story “The Congress.” “One unmistakeable sign is the fact that I find novelty neither interesting nor surprising, perhaps because I see nothing essentially new in it - it’s little more than timid variations on what’s already been.”
-- Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star
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… I reflected on the life of the expatriate American in India: the multitasking businessman or lawyer with his driver, his air-conditioned office, and his secretaries - India is the land of retainers, gofers, body servants, door openers, waiters, and flunkies. The spouse of such an expatriate is similarly elevated, transformed from a simple soul, possibly unlettered - who would have trouble finding India on a map - to a memsahib, the status of an important lady in society, with a cook, a cleaner, a chowkidar, a dhobi or launderer, and if she has a garden, she will have two gardeners.
-- Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star
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The traveler’s conceit is that barbarism is something singular and foreign, to be encountered halfway around the world in some pinched and parochial backwater. The traveler journeys to this remote place and it seems to be so: he is offered a glimpse of the worst atrocities that can be served up by a sadistic government. And then, to his shame, he realizes that they are identical to ones advocated and diligently applied by his own government.
-- Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star
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Travel is at its most rewarding when it ceases to be about your reaching a destination and becomes indistinguishable from living your life.
-- Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star
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Even with declining sales, from a peak of $5 billion a year, graphic novels in some form are probably the future of popular literature - increasingly they are being downloaded to cell phones. Purely pictorial pleasure, undemanding, without an idea or a challenge, yet obviously stimulating, a sugar high like junk food, another softener of the brain; they spell the end of the traditional novel, perhaps the end of writing itself.
-- Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star
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A [Russian] woman wants to buy a car. She is given a voucher and told, “It will be delivered in ten years.” “Morning or afternoon?” she asks. “Why do you want to know?” She says, “Because the plumber is coming in the morning.”
-- Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star
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Most people on earth are poor. Most places are blighted and nothing will stop the blight getting worse. Travel gives you glimpses of the past and the future, your own and other people’s. “I am a native in this world,” aspiring to be the Man with the Blue Guitar. But there are too many people and an enormous number of them spend their hungry days thinking about America as the Mother Ship. … Most of the world is worsening, shrinking to a ball of bungled desolation. Only the old can really see how gracelessly the world is aging and all that we have lost. Politicians are always inferior to their citizens. no one on earth is well governed. Is there hope? Yes. Most people I’d met, in chance encounters, were strangers who helped me on my way. And we lucky ghosts can travel wherever we want. The going is still good, because arrivals are departures.
-- Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star
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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.
-- Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar
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Venice, like a drawing room in a gas station, is approached through a vast apron of infertile industrial flatlands, criss-crossed with black sewer troughs and stinking of oil, the gigantic sinks and stoves of refineries and factories, all intimidating the delicate dwarfed city beyond.
-- Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar
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The disorder in Yashar’s apartment was that comfortable littering and stacking that only another writer can recognize as order - the considered scatter of papers and books a writer builds around himself until it acquires the cozy solidity of a nest.
-- Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar
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Because it was still early, and because Indian villagers seem to think of railway tracks as the margin of their world, there were people crouched all along the line, shitting. At first I thought they were simply squatting comfortably to watch the train go by, then I noticed the bright yellow hanks under them. I saw one man; he portended a hundred more, all facing the train for the diversion it offered, unhurriedly fouling the track. They were shitting when the train pulled in; they were still at it when the train pulled out. One curious group - a man, a boy, and a pig - were in a row, each shitting in his own way. A dignified man with his dhoti drawn up squatted a little distance from the tracks. He watched the train go by and he looked as if he would be there fro some time: he held a large black umbrella over his head and a newspaper on his knees. Indeed, he seemed the perfect symbol for what a man in Delhi had called “The Turd World.”
-- Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar
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It was a small tropical station in the north of Ceylon, smelling of soaked jungle and erupting drains, and with that decay that passes for charm in tropical outposts.
-- Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar
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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.
-- Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar
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An Indian girl was coming towards us. I could have used her approach as an opportunity to pass on, but I waited and we both stepped aside to let her go by. She lowered her eyes and glided along. She had delicate shoulders, dry dusted cheeks, and gleaming hair, and she smelled of some small sweetness like that of a single crushed flower.
-- Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar
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I think I am as intrepid as the next man, but I have a side - and it may be the same side that is partial to trains - that enjoys the journey only because of the agreeable delays en route, a lazy vulgar sybarite searching Asia for comfort, justifying my pleasure by the distance traveled.
-- Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar
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The effort of coming so far seemed wasted; and, really, had I come all that way to find a jail, as people travel in the greatest discomfort to the farthest ends of the earth, through jungles and bad weather for weeks and weeks, to 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.
-- Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar
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Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation; and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind. … I couldn’t recall what day it was; I had forgotten the country. Being on the trains had suspended time; the heat and dampness had slowed my memory.
-- Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar
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Traveling over a long distance becomes, after three months, like tasting wine or picking at a global buffet. A place is approached, sampled, and given a mark. A visit, pausing before the next rain pulls out, forbids gourmandizing, but a return is possible. So from every lengthy itinerary a simpler one emerges, in which Iran is penciled over, Afghanistan deleted, Pehawar gets a yes, Simla a maybe, and so on.
-- Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar
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