We have to pay to ride on the railroad. In order to be able to pay, we have to work to earn the money. So although we seem to be traveling in fast and without effort we do not take into consideration the amount of labor we had to put in to pay for the train ticket. In Thoreau's opinion it would be better to walk to wherever we are going, and probably better still not to go very far at all. His friend Emerson said, "Travel is a fool's paradise." Thoreau wrote: "I have traveled quite extensively, in Concord." He didn't believe you had to travel very far to see interesting and beautiful sights. Some people travel great distances without really seeing much of anything. The railroad just adds complications, expenses, and stress to life. The French poet Charles Baudelaire wrote a cynical poem about travel titled "Le Voyage," in which he includes this exquisite line:
Amer savoir, celui qu'or tire du voyage!
Which can be translated as: What bitter knowledge one gets from traveling! Distance lends enchantment. We think that far-away places are going to be special, but when we get there we find that they are often very ordinary. As Emerson says, "Our ghost goes with us." They lose their glamor just because we are there. We can't escape from ourselves.
Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.
John UpdikeHe had followed the parkway as far as New York, and all the way, there had been a constant stream of cars, two and sometimes three lanes of them in both directions--a movement so implacable it looked like a headlong flight. Their brows furrowed, their muscles tensed, the drivers, often with whole families in the back seats, charged straight ahead as if their lives were in jeopardy, some of them not knowing where they were heading, or heading nowhere in particular, just desperately filling the empty hours with noise and speed.
Georges Simenon, The Rules of the Game
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