Oh, the Places You'll Go!
By Alan Mittelstaedt & Alfred Lee & Andy Klein & Anthony Miller & Rebecca Schoenkopf & Ron Garmon
When That Train Rumbles Through
But I still look for you/When that train rumbles through/That’s a sound I know you’d understand.
–The Knitters, “Someone Like You”
A short schedule of readings for embarking upon a search for the railroad sound.
• Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of the Little
Jehanne of France, Blaise Cendrars.
This is where the literature of train travel begins. This mad, swirling, decades-ahead-of-its-time tapestry of words penned in 1913 by an inveterate adventurer and writer — and hero of Henry Miller — hurtles across all kinds of geographical and metaphysical boundaries. As Cendrars writes in his unremittingly intense ode to restless and relentless motion: “I deciphered all the scrambled texts of the wheels and rearranged the scattered elements into a violent beauty/That I master/and that drives me.”
• The Great Railway Bazaar, Paul Theroux.
“Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it,” writes Theroux, the poet laureate of transcontinental train travel. “Those whistles sing bewitchment: railways are irresistible bazaars, snaking along perfectly level no matter what the landscape, improving your mood with speed, and never upsetting your drink.” Some Theroux fans prefer The Old Patagonian Express or Riding the Iron Rooster, but Great Railway Bazaar was the author’s first classic railroad travelogue.
• Riding Toward Everywhere, William T.
Vollmann.
In 2007, Vollmann describes taking up jumping railroad cars at age 47, defying not only the constraints of legal authority but also, after having broken his pelvis and suffered a few small strokes, his own doctor’s orders. In his ecstatic search for freedom, the author distinguishes himself from the hobos and the citizens (whom he places in italics) who might not comprehend the personal and political nature of his actions.
I ride freight trains in the belief that I can trust myself, that I deserve to be trusted even to be a reckless fool if circumstances so turn out – and, after all, if I am dead as a result of my own folly, I am no worse off than if I died safely and soberly. The most cogent thing to be said about trainhopping is that it is the unauthorized borrowing property of others – corporations, to be sure, not fellow citizens who would be inconvenienced; I am a microbe hitching a ride upon an elephant’s trunk! – Besides so many of my proudest deeds have been unauthorized by somebody that I now subscribe to an aphorism of Lukács’s: Breaking a law is approximately as weighty a matter as missing a train.
–Anthony Miller
Published: 05/14/2008
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Other Stories by Alan Mittelstaedt
Other Stories by Alfred Lee
Other Stories by Andy Klein
Other Stories by Anthony Miller
Other Stories by Rebecca Schoenkopf
Other Stories by Ron Garmon
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Comments
Wow, you're so right - and to think that all along everyone's been thinking Hitler was this bad, inconsiderate dude!
The train! The train!
The BEST WAY TO TRAVEL!
Funny (as usual) and to the point (also, as usual.)
I am really, really, really, really glad you are the editor.