Into the dark of the night, we all travel
tranced in the eurythmics of rainfalls
outside the moving coach in a dazzle
of somebodies packed full of stories
to carry them over the westerly end
of our dreamscapes, half-assured but
willing to take on Fortune’s loose end,
as we head for our unknown Fortune.
P.S. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Thinking is the function, and life (i.e., putting thoughts into actions) is the functionary.”
Along the line of this maxim, anyone who’s been on a long distance cross-continental bus travel contracts sociological and psychological strains of Stockholm Syndrome; that whoever rides on the same bus with you will be an aggregate of the ad hoc assembly of accidental passengers, a surrogate band of battle soldiers from all walks of life, vivacious or lugubrious, voluntary or unintentional, funded or impecunious, assured or doubtful. That’s also an elemental attribute of the travel because there’s always something unexpected that happens along the way, which is what makes it all the more interesting and enriching for our life experience.
After a long but worthwhile travel by bus, you will understand what made the former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli during the reign of Queen Victoria declaimed about the lesson of travel thus: “Travel teaches toleration.” Which is also to be yoked into the ever truthful Nietzschean tenet of existentialism: “What doesn’t kill you can only make you stronger.” I can vouch for it on account of my own veritable veni vidi vici empirical learning acquired alone after five nights on two Greyhound buses from New York City, NY to Los Angeles, CA . I have lived thru it. I take the liberty of positing that I am now also become something of a student of life and literature following the existential experiences of George Orwell, Viktor E. Frankl, Henry David Thoreau, Stephen Crane, Bill Bryson, and Jane Eyre (the fictitious but realistic character) into the bargain.
A Cat in the Mirror 