by When James Joyce traveled from Dublin to Trieste for the first time in 1904, he went over Paris, Zurich and Ljubljana. Zurich, because he mistakenly believed a job to wait for him there, and Ljubljana because he – danning after the night train – that he had driven back to Trieste. When he undoubtedly pulled, the train had left, and Joyce and his partner Nora Barnacle had to spend a night on the tiles without being ready.
When I preferred to travel by train when I received the invitation to the author of James Joyce Summer School in Trieste, I wondered if I could follow Joyce’s route. However, repair work on the Austrian Tauern tunnel prevented me from taking the exact route. In addition, today’s TGV tears almost 200 km / h by France compared to the 25-60 miles per hour, in which Joyce would have navigated Switzerland and Austria. A night in the city in Milan is just as good for the muse.
On the route from London to Trieste (and then by bus to Ljubljana), I looked at the descent of writers who crossed Europe 100 years ago and how different their aesthetic, physical and emotional experiences must have been. And above all what they would have seen. What we see from trains – and as we see it – reflects a century of profound social, economic and ecological transformation. Trains represent as much progress as ever before, but today – today – a different kind of progress.
My trip had an eventful start when the Eurostar announced delays due to cable theft near Lille. Around 600 meters of copper cables were stolen from the high -speed line overnight. As proof of the competence of the France railway members, we arrived in Gare Du Nord, Paris, about on time. A station where Joyce wrote and observed a letter to his brother: “I hate the hustle and bustle, but the station has its own strange poetry, the sound of steps, the distant pipe of the steam engines and the sudden rattling of the signal bell.” For these noises pipes, coal shovels, climbing, currencies that exchange ideas and call carriers, we have digital chimes, polylingual announcements and beeping ticket barriers today. Throughout the city, Fake Bird sounds in Gare de Lyon and intends to induce calm, but instead lead to people looking for birds over their arms.
Instead of the illustrated posters of the Belle Epoque, the walls of the Metro from Gare du Nord are today climate change equations of Liam Gillick’s work of art on the logical basis of the COP21 climate conference in Paris, which was held in Paris in 2015. Remove simple, decisive facts of climate change from the public.
When the Italian police asked for the reason for my trip, I nodded Ulysses on my tablet table, which certainly saw me as a bad spy
It still seems to be the case that we do not understand our own effects on the climate crisis. Electrified trains enable us to travel with a fraction of the CO2 air traffic. I’m still flying, but try to find alternatives when I can. When traveling with the country or the sea, less mental and moral gymnastics are required – especially if the temperatures break all records. So the trains are simply more relaxed … except financially.
Virginia Woolf, who traveled from London alone to Turkey at 24, wrote: “A traveler, although he is half sleeping, white and looked out of the train window that he has to look now, because he will never see this city or this mule-cart or this woman at work in the fields.” No matter The Woman to see any The person who works from a train window in the fields nowadays is unlikely. Instead of lively country villages (and the explosion of cities in the early 20th century), we were unimaginable to urban spread and suburbs in Woolf’s times. Instead of the diverse grain and plant production of a century, today’s growths of animal agriculture and the huge country roads dominate, which dominate European landscapes to grow animal food. The consequences of this are everywhere, from the total temperature (France is 1.9 ° C warmer than 1900), and the weather pattern changes to ground reduction, dirty air and waterways as well as loss of biological diversity. But knowing how the landscape has changed in just a few decades is to know to what extent it can change again.
In the early 20th century, the railway passengers had experienced hydropower revolution because hydropower in the Alps was developed extensively. The construction of dams and reservoirs changed the alpine hydrology fundamentally and created artificial lakes, dams, power lines and industrial infrastructure to which we are used to today. An undoubtedly positive change in the past 100 years has been a considerable effort to reforest. And while these forests are generally commercially commercial, about 80% as “forest for wood supply available” are classified as a new forests and meadows with a shift to a vegetable diet almost immediately, just one example. And pastures can be replaced by solar or wind farms. Maybe there is something helpful in See Where our energy comes from so that we can understand their effects. Writers had great courage in hydropower revolution: This is how to reach the Alps by train. It was progress, modernity and independence, as well as the electrical features themselves.
The rail was militarized for a time and the trains were diverted for troop movements and devices, with civilians being confronted with extreme delays, rationing and danger. Joyce fled in Trieste in Triest during the First World War (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) in Trieste (at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) when he was regarded as an hostile alien. In the Feldkirch station in Austria, he narrowly escaped the arrest. (His brother had already been arrested separately in Trieste and was arrested until the end of the war.) He later told his biographer that he felt “in the Feldkirch Station” that the fate of Ulysses was decided. During the Second World War, many writers and artists were among those who used the European rail network to flee from the Nazis.
According to the kovid, the quiet camaraderie of trains is a bit comfortable
When Sniffer dogs attacked the TGV on the French-Italian border and the police see my passport and know which bags were mine, and the reason for my trip, I replied: “The James Joyce Summer School” supported my books and nodded Ulysses on my dream table, which rarely occupied me as a bad spy as a bad spy. Before the First World War, passes and visas were rarely necessary in Western Europe. After the war, this changed and the border stops were far longer and more often to enable paper tests.
But if Joyce had a passport in 1904, he would have been British, being classified as a British topic. I was surprised to discover that Joyce had repeatedly rejected the opportunity to get an Irish passport after independence. I knew from reading his work that he spurned close nationalism and included cosmopolitan and diverse European modernism. But rejecting an Irish passport meant limited his practical freedom. Samuel Beckett’s Irish passport made it possible for him to stay in France and to take part in resistance activities. They spent most of their lives on the continent and both identified themselves strongly as European. Europeanity is certainly still more defined by train trips than anything else today.
Although Frantz Fanon in his book Black Skin, White Masks, brilliantly immortalized a racist incident in France, the train journey in Europe was a refuge of racial prejudices for many, such as Jamaican-American writer Claude McKay and poet Langston Hughes. Hughes wrote in particular about the freedom of separation and exclusion in the areas of Soviet Union: “No Jim Crow in the features of the Soviet Union”. He traveled to South Central Asia with the Moscow-Taschkent Express, a journey that the Russia war against Ukraine today-and the entire eastern world of Europeans who do not fly largely.
For many artists, trains were an escape and a means of belonging. They are together and sustainable and can only make us more considerate. According to the kovid, the quiet camaraderie of trains is a bit comforting. Well, not always calm, but writers spend alone in caves (with our characters) for so long, it is good for us to remember that real people with all their tuna sandwiches and shoes exist.
The class segregation is less strong today than in the carriages of the first, second and third grade. Today’s first and second classes differ mostly from the sitting size, the telephone systems and the occasional cuff button. Instead of Edwardian plush office pads and decadent dining cars, we today enjoy scratchy, synthetic, easily reduced interiors and minimalist dining cars full of Dutch teenagers. Writers – apart from customers or trust funds – can usually be found in the cheap seats.
The disturbing, philosophical aspects of train travel to the 21st century: observation of life and landscape; Participation in a sustainable infrastructure; Witness of the endless novelty, education and privileges that it offers; One thinks, as Joyce put it, “of all the worlds that move at the same time”. Air trips have undoubtedly relieved the undisclosed progress, but progress is subjective and contextual. It always includes an untold or suppressed story. Slow travel allows us to think in the long term. It could serve us well to see where we came from and where we are going.
The latest novel by Caoilinn Hughes is The Alternatives, published by OneWorld (£ 9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at GuardianBookshop.com. Delivery costs can apply
