Then my misery took another form: I thought of returning. (At every station I was on the point of getting off; only the fear of being a coward prevented me.) I imagined the voice of Eugenie, crying, "Madame! It's Monsieur Gustave!" I could give my mother this tremendous joy at once; it was up to me entirely. I lulled myself with this idea: I was exhausted, and it relaxed me.
—
Flaubert in Egypt,
translated by Francis Steegmuller (1972)
VLADIMIR NABOKOV IN 1909: "INFORMAL CONTACT BETWEEN TRAIN AND CITY"
When, on such journeys as these, the train changed its pace to a dignified amble and all but grazed house fronts and shop signs, as we passed through some big German town, I used to feel a two-fold excitement, which terminal stations could not provide. I saw a city with its toylike trams, linden trees, and brick walls enter the compartment, hobnob with the mirrors, and fill to the brim the windows on the corridor side. This informal contact between train and city was one part of the thrill. The other was putting myself in the place of some passerby who, I imagined, was moved as I would be moved myself to see the long, romantic, auburn cars, with their intervestibular connecting curtains as black as bat wings and their metal lettering copper-bright in the low sun, unhurriedly negotiate an iron bridge across an everyday thoroughfare and then turn, with all windows suddenly ablaze, around a last block of houses.
—"First Love,"
Nabokov's Dozen
(1958)
V. S. PRITCHETT: "LARGE THICK COLD OMELETS"
Usually I traveled second or third class on the Spanish trains, for there the Spanish crowd came in and were good company. Often the women traveled with a pet bird in a cage: everyone took their shoes off and when they unpacked their large thick cold omelets, they were careful to offer it first to everyone in the carriage. At the stations, which were often a couple of miles from the towns they served, water sellers calling out "Agua fresca" walked up and down in the red dust of the south and the pale dust of Castile.
—
The Spanish Temper
(1954)
EVELYN WAUGH ON THE TRAIN TO NAIROBI: "MY ILL TEMPER GRADUALLY COOLED"
But my ill temper gradually cooled as the train, with periodic derailments (three, to be exact, between Mombassa and Nairobi), climbed up from the coast into the highlands. In the restaurant car that evening I sat opposite a young lady who was on her way to be married. She told me that she had worked for two years in Scotland Yard and that had coarsened her mind; but since then she had refined it again in a bank at Dar-es-Salaam. She was glad to be getting married as it was impossible to obtain fresh butter in Dar-es-Salaam.
I awoke during the night to draw up my blanket. It was a novel sensation, after so many weeks, not to be sweating. Next morning I changed from white drill to gray flannel. We arrived in Nairobi a little before lunch time.
—
Remote People
(1931)
CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS: A MOSLEM FAMILY IN THE COMPARTMENT
At the foot of the Kashmir mountains, between Rawalpindi and Peshawar, the archaeological site of Taxila lies a few kilometers from the railway line. I went there by train, which led to my being the involuntary cause of a minor drama. There was only one first-class compartment of a fairly old type—sleep four, seat six—simultaneously reminiscent of a cattle truck, a drawing room and—because of the protective bars on the windows—a prison. A Moslem family was already in possession, when I got in: a husband, with his wife and two children. The lady was in purdah: although she made an attempt to isolate herself by crouching down on her bunk wrapped in her
burkah
and with her back obstinately turned towards me, the promiscuity eventually appeared too shocking and the family had to split up. The wife and children went off to the "Ladies Only" compartment, while the husband continued to occupy the reserved seats and to glare at me. I managed to take a philosophical view of the incident.
—
Tristes Tropiques
(1955), translated by John and Doreen Weightman
SIMENON: THE MAN WHO WATCHED TRAINS GO BY
That feeling about trains, for instance. Of course he had long outgrown the boyish glamour of the steam engine. Yet there was something that had an appeal for him in trains, especially in night trains, which always put queer, vaguely improper notions into his head.
—
The Man Who Watched Trains Go By
(1938), translated by Marc Romano and D. Thin
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: TO ARACATACA WITH HIS MOTHER
We were the only passengers, perhaps in the entire train, and so far nothing had been of any real interest to me. I sank into the lethargy of
Light in August,
smoking without pause, but with occasional, rapid glances to identify the places we were leaving behind. With a long whistle the train crossed the salt marshes of the swamp and raced at top speed along a bone-shaking corridor of bright red rock, where the deafening noise of the cars became intolerable. But after about fifteen minutes it slowed down and entered the shadowy coolness of the plantations with discreet silence, and the atmosphere grew denser and the ocean breeze was not felt again. I did not have to interrupt my reading to know we had entered the hermetic realm of the banana region.
The world changed. Stretching away on both sides of the track were the symmetrical, interminable avenues of the plantations, along which oxcarts loaded with green stalks of bananas were moving. In uncultivated spaces were sudden red brick camps, offices with burlap at the windows and fans hanging from the ceilings, and a solitary hospital in a field of poppies. Each river had its village and its iron bridge that the train crossed with a blast of its whistle, and the girls bathing in the icy water leaped like shad as it passed, unsettling travelers with their fleeting breasts.
—
Living to Tell the Tale
(2004), translated by Edith Grossman
JAN MORRIS: ALTERCATION ON THE ZEPHYR
I had pleasant companions at breakfast on the California Zephyr—a girl from Fresno who had never been on a train before, and two railroad buffs who kept me informed about the state of the track. However, I did have one altercation in the dining car. My ticket, I had been told, entitled me to anything I liked on the menu, but when I asked for cornflakes and scrambled eggs I was told that I was entitled to one or the other but not both. I called for the supervisor to expostulate, but I did not get far. I had got it wrong, the functionary said, not unkindly, and I quote him word for word: "You're not from this country. You don't understand the lingo." But the girl from Fresno thought the man had been rather rude, and one of the train buffs offered to share his scrambled eggs with me—only fair, really, because I had already urged upon him some of my Cooper's Oxford Marmalade.
—
Contact! A Book of Encounters
(2010)
Travel Wisdom of Henry Fielding
In terms of travel, Henry Fielding was, as a youth, a student at the the University of Leiden, and after he earned a law degree in London he became a circuit judge. His life (1707–1754) was short and turbulent, but he was productive, first as a writer of satirical plays, and after these were declared unlawful he wrote political pamphlets and the great novels Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749). His ill health burdened him: he suffered from asthma, liver disease, gout, and dropsy (edema), which he refers to repeatedly in his Voyage to Lisbon. I feel that his illnesses heightened his sensibilities and contributed to his close observation and the bite of his satire. He set sail for Lisbon looking for health, but the meandering voyage sickened him further and he died soon after he arrived. These paragraphs are from his Voyage to Lisbon, which was published the year after his death.