online: 17 december 2010 modified: 26, 27, 28, 29 november, 1, 6, 17 december 2010 25 november 2010 adapting to
transportation
London Saint Pancras departure lounge... waiting for the 14.34 to Brussels...
...adapting to the journey tempo (and to the hassles of packing, checking that nothing vital is forgotten, hoping there'll be no unforeseen delays of local traffic between house and main line departure station... etcetera... etcetera...) i was unable to attend to anything but the stressful presence of such contexts rapidly passed through... without time to adapt to any at the tempo of unforced body rhythms...
...i suppose this explains much of the resistance to modern life... the constant rush through semi-familiar surroundings to which one seldom has the time to enjoy the pleasures and familiarities of places well known and activities in which one is highly skilled and thus able to enact automatically... with conscious mind free of worry...
...but i'm familiar enough with the tempo of this journey to be able to stay in the lounge to write this while the majority rush to obey the announcement... and queue needlessly to get aboard a train which leaves in about 20 minutes...
...and now a pause in this writing while i too pick up my luggage and obediently ascend to the trains above via an inclined travellator... and find my way to coach 3 seat 22 beside a man who is already reading and correcting what looks like a mathematical or scientific typescript... (he continues throughout the journey, absorbed in what he is doing)...
15:11
...entering a tunnel which i guess is the undersea one... already five minutes into the darkness of the earth... and i wonder how many of us show any awareness of leaving daylight or of travelling under the water at around 100 kilometres per hour... what an astonishing thing... but of course everything is astonishing (be it natural or artificial) until one is used to it... (though often i prefer being a beginner, treating modern life as perpetual childhood)...
15:30
...i must have slept... for we're back in daylight... i return to consciousness from a semi-dream in which the train has stopped in a cutting and the first passenger to climb to the fence opens a small gate and directs those following to walk away across the fields through which the train had been travelling...
1630
...moving slowly after a delay of 16 minutes waiting for permission to enter Lille station... the announcement says that in an hour we'll be in Brussels...
...travelling now on a local train i was conversing with a man who had been typing very rapidly and skilfully on a laptop... he told me he was writing to a Belgian novelist and for a while we talked of literature... he told me that his education was in archeology... at which i surprised him by saying that writing is a kind of archeology... yes, he said, it is... and that was the topic about which he was writing to the novelist...
...then we got out of the train and he carried two of my three pieces of luggage downstairs... and promised to send me an email...
...the joys and sufferings of travel... unexpected things that happen when travelling outside familiar surroundings... and poor design of unfamiliar experience... though there are signs that the conscious designing of artificial experience is now being tackled and is no longer neglected... though still tied to our narrow interests as job-holding producers and not yet to the wider interests of all of us as consumers, as users... or as people!
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