(I should say: it's actually a lovely book, with only some of the drawbacks of those compilations: a bit of "this journey is in here so you can aspire to badassery even though you're probably not going to this remote corner of the world for a 45 minute train ride." But it's pleasantly informative, with great photography, and so for this year of more-daydream-than-travel it's a nice fit. ANYWAY, past the jump, more about books n trains.)
For years in grad school, my greatest joy was the Northeastern regional network of Amtrak. Taking the train down to do research in New Haven, to see friends in New York, or up to Portland Maine for getaway weekends: these journeys lifted me out of the stressful grad school context of Boston and set me in motion. Trains are uniquely magical to me. You're on a fixed path, with the landscape flitting past your window, in a constant state of flux that requires none of your focus or control. I love it, and I specifically love to read or write on trains.
I'm gonna jump back to Alain de Botton here, because his writing on trains hits right to the heart of where I'm at on the subject:
Of all modes of transport, the train is perhaps the best aid to thought. The views have none of the potential monotony of those on a ship or a plane, moving quickly enough for us not to get exasperated but slowly enough to allow us to identify objects. They offer us brief, inspiring glimpses into private domains, letting us see a woman at the precise moment when she takes a cup from a shelf in her kitchen, then carrying us on to a patio where a man is sleeping and then to a park where a child is catching a ball thrown by a figure we cannot see... Every time my mind goes blank, having hit on a difficult idea, the flow of consciousness is assisted by the possibility of looking out the window, locking on to an object and following it for a few seconds, until a new coil of thought is ready to form and can unravel without pressure. (The Art of Travel, 56)At home, de Botton suggests, our static surroundings subtly instruct us that change is impossible, that we are fixed entities, but with the landscape slipping past the window of a train, our mind swings freely and eagerly, encouraged by the newness of the vista at hand. (This, I think, is also why we tend on vacations to reevaluate the shape of our lives, to think about where we want to redirect our efforts when we return home, or that most baseline-pleasureable of activities, why we like looking at those real estate listings in the windows of Florence or Bamberg or Bristol. "I could make a new life for myself," we think.)
While de Botton talks about this in terms of writing - and I absolutely have found this to be the case, both in academic writing and writing for pleasure - it's also true of reading, which in its own way is an act of imagined alternatives. In Japan, I used most of my train time to journal, or to read on my Kindle, and it had exactly the kind of freedom/ease/joy that de Botton describes and that I experienced in my Boston days of trainriding.
One of my projects of last year was reading everything Kazuo Ishiguro has written, after Remains of the Day knocked my socks off. In my Osaka days, I turned to his Never Let Me Go, which may not be as profound or complex a work as that earlier one, but was probably even more emotionally potent to me. From what I gather, the film adaptation jettisons or flattens out most of what makes the book remarkable, so go straight to the source on this one and maybe you too can soon be trying not to openly cry on a train through the Japanese countryside!
Ishiguro's writing is, it strikes me, very much about lost opportunities, and how time slips away; Never Let Me Go may be a piece of dystopian fiction, but its core narrative is that of a narrator whose amiability and earnest simplicity has left her tending to others at the loss of her own potential happiness, and the book's final chapters reckon with the lost years and the lost window of possibility in a thoroughly emotionally shattering way, largely through her unadorned and self-regardless prose. In a way, it does join hands with his framing of dystopia as something that, by and large, would be accepted by both society at large and those it seeks to oppress, pointing out how often we in our personal lives shrug and accept the losses that are handed to us. I don't want to go into the plot or the details, because the way it unfolds is part of its magic, but this book really shook me.
In between rounds of tearing up over Ishiguro, I had my light reading to keep me company. Antony Sher's Year of the King is a tremendous, classic glimpse into an enviable process through Sher's diaries. The book traces the year in which his 1980s Richard III with the RSC took shape through conversations with his director and designers, research, and travel. More recently, he's published two similar diaries: Year of the Fat Knight and Year of the Mad King, outlining his process on Falstaff and Lear respectively. While the former lacks some of the depth and frenzy of his journey with Richard, the latter is engrossing: Sher's work on Lear comes at the same time as tragedy strikes his own family and as he wages his own physical and psychological struggle with bodily injury and disorder. Neither book is something that, like Year of the King, I'd want to assign to acting students, but they're extremely pleasant vacation reading.
Finally, Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. It's been on my radar for at least fifteen years, but I'd somehow never gotten around to it, and truly never knew what it was about until I picked it up for this trip. Hilariously, I had thought it was about The Power of Positive Thinking, when it is in fact about denial in the face of loss and grief. Didion is so good, so detailed, and so self-interrogating about the year following her husband's death, that her insights spiderweb into a broad spectrum of loss experiences that she isn't talking about. (In some cases, that she very pointedly isn't talking about; despite her brief passage cleaving death-grief from divorce-grief, there was a lot of harmonic resonance in that arena.) It's my first Didion, so I've since picked up Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which joins a growing stack of books-for-fun on my happy shelves.
An aside (is this post all asides? PROBABLY!): it was glorious in Japan to discover the joy of reading-for-pleasure after years of feeling I had to be strategic and choosy in how I spent my time. I'm now, gradually, rebuilding the muscle of doing what I like without thinking of it as Time Spent On This And Therefore Lost, which was one of the more pernicious neuroses that snared me in grad school. One of the things I long liked about myself was being someone who cared more about how life was being spent, and who with, rather than what I accomplished. Grad school brain didn't make me better at accomplishing things, but it yanked me into a land of Must Beat Arbitrary Benchmarks And Succeed In Ill-Defined Ways In Order To Make An Appropriate Life, and holy moly am I glad to be casting off from that particular shore. (The shore is covered in busted-up tires, sand crabs, empty pepto-bismol bottles, and stereos that are loudly blaring ska music and TED Talks, it's a terrible place.)
Anyhow. This is sort of half-book-report, half-trip-report, but I suppose if there is a Thesis to this post, it would be: read a book on a train! Also yell at your politicians to build more high-speed rail in America! It's the best and the more you have the more you want to use it... forever.
