Quote of the Day (Robert Louis Stevenson, With a Thought for Valentine’s Day)

“How the world gives and takes away, and brings sweethearts near only to separate them again into distant and strange lands; but to love is the great amulet which makes the world a garden; and ‘hope, which comes to all,’ outwears the accidents of life.”— Scottish man of letters Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894), Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879)

Quote of the Day (Robert Benchley, on Traveling With a Baby)

“There is much to be said for those who maintain that rather should the race be allowed to die out than that babies should be taken from place to place along our national arteries of traffic. On the other hand, there are moments when babies are asleep. (Oh, yes, there are. There must be.) But it is practically a straight run of ten or a dozen hours for your child of four. You may have a little trouble in getting the infant to doze off, especially as the train newsboy waits crouching in the vestibule until he sees signs of slumber on the child's face and then rushes in to yell, ‘Copy of Life, out today!’ right by its pink, shell-like ear. But after it is asleep, your troubles are over except for wondering how you can shift your ossifying arm to a new position without disturbing its precious burden.”— American humorist Robert Benchley (1889-1945), “Kiddie-Kar Travel,” in Pluck and Luck (1925)

Okay, the passage of nearly 100 years means that, more likely than not, families will be taking planes instead of trains—and the barking newsboy, with his get-up-and-go energy and entrepreneurial vigor, is a thing of the post.

But, with school out and the summer travel season upon us again (and the fear of COVID receding, though not yet entirely gone), parents (including two I can think of) are about to experience something like the sheer terror that Benchley is talking about.

Funny how that “ossifying arm” keeps being passed along from generation to generation…

Quote of the Day (Truman Capote, on an Idyllic August Cruise in the Aegean)

“August is a month when the meltemi, a raucous wind filled with bits of sand dislodged from distant deserts, blows. It roars so roughly that occasionally we had to take shelter in protected caves. But for the better part the days were calm and passed in an azure haze of crystal water and spaghetti and fresh-caught fish and cold wine and delicious dreamless afternoon siestas. Often we stopped to swim in the far out-to-sea depths; sometimes, when we spotted isolated beaches clean as the inside of seashells, we travelled to them by speed boat and picnicked there.”—American fiction writer, essayist, librettist and screenwriter Truman Capote (1924-1984), “Yachts and Things,” Vanity Fair, December 2012, reprinted in The Complete Stories (2013)

Quote of the Day (Shirley MacLaine, With a Realization From Her Travels)

“The more I traveled the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.” —Oscar-winning actress and dancer Shirley MacLaine, Don't Fall Off the Mountain (1970)

(The image accompanying this post is a studio promotional photo of Shirley MacLaine, taken in 1960.)

Quote of the Day (Paul Theroux, on the Difference Between Travel and Tourism)

“The difference between travel and tourism: is the difference between walking in the hot sun to meet an angry person who is going to insult me and then tell me his amazing story, and lying in the sun sipping a cool drink and reading, say, Death in Venice. The first is more profitable; the second more pleasant. Both are enlightening.”—U.S. travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux quoted in Matthew Kronsberg, “20,000 Questions: Paul Theroux,” The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 26-27, 2015

Quote of the Day (Ann Beattie, on an Airport Experience for Some Women This Weekend)

“After clearing security at the airport, did you remove from the bin your belt, your loose change, the necklace that initially set off the alarm and resulted in your having to step aside to be patted down, your laptop, your folding umbrella, your empty thermos, your jacket, your sweater, your beret, your purse, and the brooch that may have contributed to the necklace’s having set off the alarm that subsequently resulted in your being patted down, forgetting one shoe?” —American short-story writer Ann Beattie, with nearly 25 questions to help “How to Think Through Finding a Lost Shoe,” The New Yorker, Oct. 8, 2018

Quote of the Day (Bill Bryson, on Why He Still Enjoys Traveling)

“I still enjoy traveling a lot. I mean, it amazes me that I still get excited in hotel rooms just to see what kind of shampoo they've left me.”—American travel writer Bill Bryson quoted in K.C. Summers, “A Word With…Bill Bryson,” The Washington Post, Aug. 14, 2005

Photo of Bill Bryson taken in November 2005; crop and level adjustment of Robert Cowen's en:File:Bill_Bryson.jpg.

Quote of the Day (F. Scott Fitzgerald, on a Train Ride Home From School at Christmastime)

“One of my most vivid memories is of coming back West from prep school and later from college at Christmas time….

“When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again.

“That’s my Middle West—not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow.”—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

Since my twenties, every year around this time, my mind drifts to and fastens on this passage near the conclusion of The Great Gatsby, just before the rhapsodic, better-known last few paragraphs on the Dutch ships discovering the “fresh green breast of the New World” for the first time. 

In the postwar period, and particularly since the deregulation of the airlines that made plane travel more affordable starting in the late 1970s, countless college kids have taken to the air to make their way home. It’s certainly convenient, but high above the earth, they miss so much that Fitzgerald would have seen right outside his window on the train.

In the 1910s, F. Scott Fitzgerald would have taken this holiday trip probably about a half-dozen times—first, while at Newman Prep in Hackensack, NJ, a suburb of New York City, and then at the conclusion of the semester at Princeton University. He would have had a great deal to do that could have distracted him on those trips—reading, jotting down something in his journal, or, Fitzgerald being Fitzgerald, catching his breath at the sight of a pretty girl walking down the aisle of his train.

But these were long trips, and those activities, no matter how consuming, could only occupy his mind for so long. So inevitably, the landscape made its vivid impression on him, and his imagination would freeze-frame the moments. 

Transportation in the forms already evolving in the 1920s—the automobile and the airplane—meant not only the annihilation of distance but the annihilation of individuals in Fitzgerald’s fiction: Jay Gatsby is in a car involved in a fatal hit-and-run accident, while in Fitzgerald’s uncompleted The Last Tycoon, movie producer Monroe Stahr dies in a plane crash. 

In contrast, railroads were a mature industry by this point, but they remained functional and provided (certainly for Fitzgerald) an element of nostalgia that the two forms that have largely supplanted it have never been able to adequately provide.

In an article for The Atlantic four years ago, author and Midwestern Susan Choi told interviewer Joe Fassler that she regarded this as among the most beautiful and mysterious in the entire novel: “When I'm reading the book, I look forward to the arrival of this passage like one of those trains. I know it's going to give me chills, and it always does.”

Read it again. I’m sure you’ll agree.

(The image accompanying this post is of the Minneapolis, St. Paul and Sault Ste. Marie Railroad, a subsidiary of the Canadian Pacific Railway, arriving in Almena, Wisc., sometime in the 1920s.)