Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

In the most comfortable compartment of the many night trains I had occupied on my trip was a wide bed with a soft duvet, a writing desk, and a bathroom as large as any in a Japanese hotel—with a shower stall and a swing-out sink. I took a hot shower, drank some beer, and went to bed. I woke to green bushes, and trees in bud, and a silvery fog like threadbare silk fraying to scraps and ghosting over the green hedges and plow marks of neatly ruled fields.

The mild morning in Paris was a gilded evaporation of dissolving fog, like a mist of decomposing angels, the sun burning through its essence and beautifying the ornate backdrop of biscuit-colored buildings, revealing the city to me once again as a luminous stage set.

For the sake of symmetry, and because I was hungry and had time to kill, I checked my bag at the Gare du Nord and walked across the street to the Brasserie Terminus Nord. I ordered the same meal that I'd eaten that early evening, months and months ago, before taking the Orient Express to Budapest—bouillabaisse, green salad, a half bottle of white burgundy. Afterwards, I walked a little, and thought: Once a city's boulevards have been marched by triumphant Nazis, they never look quite so grand again. Then I took the Eurostar to London.

I fell asleep and woke after nightfall in Kent, at the far end of the Channel Tunnel, intending to finish this book, which I'd written every day of the trip. In the darkness tonight no images of the past were visible to disturb me. The landscape was shrouded with a veil of forgiveness, and bad memories were buried—like many I'd endured on my trip—in the dark backward and abysm of time. Nothing to remember but my last meal. At the end of my day's notes I wrote the one word, Done.

It's true that travel is the saddest of pleasures, the long-distance overland blues. But I also thought what I'd kept fretting about throughout my trip, like a mantra of vexation building in my head, words I never wrote. Most people on earth are poor. Most places are blighted and nothing will stop the blight getting worse. Travel gives you glimpses of the past and the future, your own and other people's. "I am a native in this world," aspiring to be the Man with the Blue Guitar. But there are too many people and an enormous number of them spend their hungry days thinking about America as the Mother Ship. I could be a happy Thai, but there is no life on earth that I am less suited to living than that of an Indian, rich or poor. Most of the world is worsening, shrinking to a ball of bungled desolation. Only the old can really see how gracelessly the world is aging and all that we have lost. Politicians are always inferior to their citizens. No one on earth is well governed. Is there hope? Yes. Most people I'd met, in chance encounters, were strangers who helped me on my way. And we lucky ghosts can travel wherever we want. The going is still good, because arrivals are departures.