Trail To The Destination Chapter 10

I don't know if it was the effect of alcohol, or because I was tired, or because the ride was only an hour long, and my mood was different from before. Anyway, sitting in the chair, I felt that everything around me was strange and unfamiliar. I watched a movie before, which was about a man walking on the street, bustling with people, but in fact, the people around him had changed inside. They were aliens or bugs, I don't remember, anyway, the man was quite panicked; there was also a novel with a similar scene, but it was the protagonist himself who changed, and he didn't know it. At this time, people sat firmly in their chairs, some looked out the window, some talked, and some listened to music. It didn't seem to make any sense; the scenery outside the window receded when the train moved, the conductor checked the tickets, a woman in the next seat tried to comfort the child, one person said to another, "Can you help me put this up?", and the smell of food wafted from somewhere else. All of these were not right.

When I was a kid, I moved around a lot. I took the train a few times, but I don't remember anything. Maybe I was too young or I fell asleep as soon as I got on the train. When I was about ten to fourteen years old, my house was very close to a railway, only two or three hundred steps away. The railroad was the brightest metal I had ever seen at that time. The surface never rusted, and it was smooth and dazzling. It crawled from a distance and stretched to the horizon, making people wonder if there was anything worth going there. There was grass on this side of the railway, and farmland on the other side, in short, it was a playground. Children were accustomed to trains. If it was a particularly long train, they might count the number of carriages, but usually they just waited patiently for it to pass, just like a group of horses running over, you always have to give way to them. If there is any special impression, the first is the sound of the train whistle. The children competed with their courage, standing by the railroad tracks and watching the front of the train rushing over. It was quite thrilling. The vibration and air waves, the increasingly obvious disgust in the driver's eyes, and the spatial illusion when the front of the train approached, all made people want to run away. Especially the sound of the whistle, which the driver used to scare the children, became sharper and sharper, and went straight into our brains. Fortunately, the front of the car passed by in a flash, and we breathed a sigh of relief, knowing that we were safe. At this time, even the sound of the whistle subsided.

Let me tell you a little story. More than a hundred years ago, a Dutch scientist also noticed this phenomenon, but he had a different idea. James new railway was built next to Bai Beiluo's home. He heard the frequency change of the whistle and was moved. At that time, the Doppler effect had just been proposed and had not been proven. Bai Beiluo was skeptical about Doppler's theory and planned to verify it.

June 3 and 5, 1845, were destined to be memorable days. During these two days, Baiberault conducted two tests at the Maarssen Railway Station, asking the boilerman to accelerate the train to 70 kilometers per hour, and inviting a professional musician to blow a long G note with a trumpet in the carriage. Other musicians stood outside the railroad tracks in groups of several hundred meters apart and listened, and then described the note value they heard. On the return trip, the musicians on the ground played and the people on the train listened.

If there hadn't been the newly invented steam locomotive, the verification of the Doppler effect would have been delayed for several years, because before that, the fastest machine on land could not bring such a significant frequency shift effect. If a leopard roared and pounced, people would probably be able to hear its voice becoming more ferocious, but such an experiment is obviously not as safe as Bai Bello's plan. These are all off-topic.

Knowledge is order, but unfortunately not all order. Among all the orders, I like the order described by science the most. People may feel that the physical world is cold, I think this is mostly because we are unwilling to take our situation seriously. I remember reading a book, at the end of which it said that existence is essentially tragic, but people have always treated it as comedy or even farce, and science is restoring its original tragic color, which can at least make human beings more solemn---that's the general idea. The internal combustion locomotive is a great invention, just as the Internet is a great invention. Among all kinds of inventions, they belong to the same group that connects people, creating some beautiful realities and breaking some beautiful fantasies. Beyond the horizon, the far end of the Internet, there is no special attraction even for children, right? In this era, just like every era, fantasies continue to sprout, but they are not so dependent on others, I think.

What a precious thing is the sense of strangeness. Longing for strange things is a major motivation for traveling. Even if we have a certain amount of knowledge and foresight about the destination and its affiliated things before departure, the episodes and changes along the way are enough to make people fantasize. The more we exhaust the possibilities of daily life (this exhaustion is usually achieved through self-restraint, such as supporting a restrictive system or culture), the more we expect others to become new possibilities for ourselves, and the other party is also thinking the same way. Nothing can destroy the sense of strangeness more than this mutual expectation. When we see something that is obviously strange, but we don’t feel strange, then another kind of strangeness, not pleasant but terrifying, or arises spontaneously, that is the strangeness of the entire order system, just like seeing an acquaintance suddenly reveal a strange expression that has never been seen before, our trust in the world order is peeled off from somewhere in our hearts like peeling skin. As far as I know, the chill that humans create for each other is far greater than the coldness of the physical world. At times like this, the order established by science is still so reliable and seems warm. So that day I closed my eyes and leaned back in my chair, recalling in my mind a popular biology book I had read not long ago. After a while, I felt comfortable.

As mentioned earlier, the first deepest impression of living near the railway is the frequent sound of the train whistle, and the second deepest impression is a scene that I occasionally see. Every night, at a fixed time, a passenger train passes by. At that time, the children were either sent to bed or still playing outside. I remember looking up at the row of yellow windows, and the warm light made the people in the neighboring windows look like characters in a movie. These were people from another world, going to another world. Once, I clearly saw a boy of my age, with his right hand half supporting his cheek, his face pressed against the window glass, looking forward thoughtfully. The window passed by my field of vision for no more than three seconds, but it was long enough to leave a solid picture in my memory. Several years later, I sat in the seat next to the window, and I saw people outside at night, but I had no impression.

If I have a good impression of traveling by train, it is the feeling at night. This requires many prerequisites, one of which is to have a seat next to the window and facing the front of the train. In the 1980s and 1990s, the chance of such a good thing, I think, was about one in 20. The trains at that time were so crowded that it was not an exaggeration to say that they were a moving purgatory. I heard a story from a friend, and I have told it many times, and I will tell it again whenever I have the chance: Before the Spring Festival in the late 1980s, he returned to Chongqing from Guangzhou. He got on the train and had just put his package on the luggage rack. Before he had time to say goodbye to it, he was swept up by the surging flow of people. He passed through three or four carriages in a row before his feet landed on the ground. He could not stretch out his legs, and at most he could stick his head out to breathe a few times.

If you are very lucky, at night, usually after midnight, the carriage is finally quiet. In the sleeper carriage, the lights have dimmed long ago. This is the time to sleep, and it is also the time when people are most reluctant to sleep. It is pitch black outside the window, just right not to disturb the passengers. The flow makes people feel peaceful and a little scared. This is the right feeling. Things are between solvable and insolvable, and people are between order and chaos. Order and chaos just do their job. This is not a beautiful thing that can be encountered casually. As mentioned at the beginning, on the train leaving Beijing, everything fits perfectly, which makes people feel that the order is false and deliberate. In that case, people don’t know whether others and themselves are just roles.

The longest train ride I took was sixty hours and I spent three nights on the train.

On the first night, my seat was next to the aisle, and there were four people squeezed on the chair, and two children were sleeping under the seat. I don't remember whether I slept well or not, but at dawn the next day, everyone looked pale. The expected fatigue of a long journey made people considerate and friendly to each other, like a group of people in distress. Even so, from the second day on, the carriage was almost always quiet, because everyone was too tired to chat. Only the newcomers would make a few noises, and we put on the smile of seniority, the smile that the first person who fell into the well would give to the later ones who fell in.

On the second night, I was lucky enough to get a seat next to a window. It was a wonderful night. The windows could be opened at that time. My cheeks were numb from the wind, but I was reluctant to close the window. Besides, other passengers also needed fresh air. The train passed through the mountainous area. The dark mountains were like clusters of palms, slowly swaying by. Occasionally, a light flashed, but I didn't know whether the light source was a house or a pedestrian. Every one or two hours, the train would stop at a small station. Sometimes people got on and off, sometimes not. The water filler on the platform moved slowly a few times, and then with a "ding" sound, the train moved again. I once walked outside the train at a small station and stood for a while. I didn't know where I was. It was a rare thing.

As for the third night, I was exhausted and bone-deep tired. Finally, we were close to the end. Everyone was resurrected, like coming out of their shells, and even smiled. The sun also lit up the carriage. Finally, I heard the whistle blow long and timely, as if to exhale the breath in my chest, just as the saying goes, "The road is long, people are tired, and donkeys are neighing."

Bank of China

More than a decade ago, I bought a laptop for the first time, and I always carried that small black thing with me when I went out. I didn't expect that some of my travel habits would change from then on, and it would be difficult to go back. First of all, when choosing accommodation, I always give priority to places with internet access. Not only that, when I travel alone and stay in a hotel, I naturally give priority to the so-called "king bed room" so that I can lie down comfortably. Moreover, according to the good habits I developed at home, I put the ashtray next to the pillow, which is the most convenient.

At that time, wireless networks were not very popular. The facilities in hotels, at least the kind I could afford, were usually a long table opposite the bed with a computer on it. James network cable was connected to the wall next to the computer. This network cable supported the computer, so it was not very long. Of course, I could use the hotel computer or connect my laptop to the network cable, but in this case, I would have to sit at the table to surf the Internet, which was too much like work. I ran around because I didn't want to work. How could I sit upright at night after running around all day? My habit was to wash up, sigh, express my condolences for my hard work, then lie down, put the laptop on my knees, log on to the Internet, and start doing the boring things I was used to at home.

But the network cable was not long enough. Once or twice, I tried to turn the direction and put the pillow at the end of the bed. In this way, I might be able to connect to the network, but it was very uncomfortable, and the pillow and ashtray would fall to the ground at night, disturbing my sleep. Moreover, in some rooms, even at the end of the bed, I couldn't reach the network cable. So I changed my strategy and chose the so-called "standard room", that is, the room with two single beds. At this point, I think every reader can understand my intention: a single bed is easy to drag, but a large bed is really hard to drag.

During those one or two years, after each move-in, I would lock the door and drag the bed, moving the head of the bed close to the network cable. Sometimes this was easy to accomplish, but sometimes it was quite laborious and required careful measurements and calculations. Once, after several failures, I realized that I needed to draw a sketch. The layout of the room was cramped and strange. In the end, I had to stand one bed upright to make room and rotate the second bed. After returning home, I complained to my friends about this. One of my friends stared at me for a while and slowly said, "In fact, you can buy a longer network cable and carry it with you."

Some people are like this. The more they help others, the more hateful they appear.

I bought a five-meter-long network cable and hid it in my bag when I went to Sichuan in the fall of that year. When I checked in at night, I heard a long-lost sentence jump out of my mouth: "I want a king-size bed room." When I got to the room, I took out the network cable box. It was a very delicate thing, a bit like a tape measure. The network cable was coiled inside. When I needed it, I pulled it out, three meters or five meters, as long as I wanted. I proudly pulled out the network cable for several meters, connected one end to the network port on the wall, then crossed the room, wrapped it around the wooden pillar at the head of the bed a few times to fix it slightly, and then connected it to the laptop. The clerk came to change the towels at my request, but for some reason, she didn't leave immediately. I guess she was attracted by my arrangement and was amazed. This girl either didn't understand what I was doing for a long time, or she was hateful by nature. Anyway, she whispered in the end: "We have wireless network here." The world changes fast.

The Internet, including our large local area network, makes people feel both convenient and frustrating. The so-called frustrating thing is that old habits at home are hard to change when traveling. There is an old saying that when a guest arrives, he feels at home. James hospitable person always says to the guest: "It's just like home." If it's just like home, I might as well not go out. And this is not just the bad habit of indulging in the Internet itself. The Internet has changed some of the characteristics of travel, or even eliminated them, and those characteristics are precisely some of the most attractive aspects of travel. For example, the feeling of being in a foreign land, with the Internet, six out of ten are gone. Or it is said that the feeling of being in a foreign land is bad, maybe it is, but what if it is not all?

James few days ago, I happened to flip through a collection of poems from the Tang Dynasty. I bought the book when I was young. There are some red dots on the pages. I think I liked some poems back then and marked them. I felt strange when I saw it this time, because I didn't feel anything special when reading these poems. I remember buying this collection of poems when I was traveling. I was probably in a bad mood, so I resonated with the poems that expressed homesickness. Now we are all on the Internet, and we are close to each other. When we think of relatives and friends, we can just call them, or if we are too lazy to call, we can just write a few words on social software, or if we are too lazy to write, we can just send a picture, or the so-called "emoticon", or we can just send a picture. We can always contact each other, so we will talk about it tomorrow.

Many people think that the best of Du Fu's poems is "Climbing the Heights". I think so too. "I often feel sad in autumn, and I climb the stage alone after a hundred years of illness". Only the ancients could write such sentences. What is sad autumn today? Everyone thinks that autumn is the best season for traveling. Have you heard of the "National Day holiday"? At the order of the General Trade Union, hundreds of millions of people went on the road. Even an idle man like me went with them this year. Everyone was happy. What was there to be sad about? The only thing was that there were too many people and they were stuck in the middle of the road. In autumn, being able to often be a guest outside is simply something to be envied and envied. You should publish a lot of photos and travel notes to show off to your relatives and friends. As for climbing the stage alone, there is no such thing. Even if you really travel alone, it's fine if you don't climb the stage. Once you climb it, you will be among the crowd. The stage that can be climbed has long been known on the Internet and is crowded with tourists. It is only that he has been ill for a hundred years, which is somewhat sympathetic. However, if Du Fu were alive today, he would take dozens of antibiotics a day and would not get sick. At the age of 55, how could he say he is old? He is still far from retirement.

"Under Yugutai, the clear river water, how many pedestrians shed tears in the middle", is also my favorite. I often say that just based on these two lines, I have to go to Ganzhou for a visit. One year, I really went there. I met the Ganjiang River in Taihe County. From then on, I went south until I got to Ganzhou. The river water was not very clear. There were many logs dumped along the river. I dare not say whether there were any other things, but there was not a single tear of pedestrians. Looking at Ganzhou City from afar, the world was so prosperous and dazzling, so I changed my mind and turned east.

The difference lies in the mood. Qu Yuan traveled alone to the south, so he was saddened by the sight of fragrant grass and thought of warning when he saw the frost; Zhang Heng traveled alone, so he looked around and planned to return to his hut. As soon as I go out, I am overjoyed, as if I were escaping. Wherever I go, there are people everywhere, with food and shelter. Although I say I am alone, I don’t really feel lonely. If I could still force myself to sigh many years ago, I don’t even sigh much since I got online. Occasionally I feel lonely, turn on my mobile phone, and the messages in the social software will immediately come to me. If I go to the website, all the news about the world that concerns me is in my palm. It is true that a mustard seed can contain Mount Sumeru, and a small machine can conquer the world. At this time, talking about travel thoughts is a bit hypocritical.

Some people may say that it is hypocritical to complain while enjoying the benefits of the Internet. Maybe. People are different. Some people are grateful for the benefits they receive and never change their mind. I cannot be so loyal and righteous. For me, only valuable things are worth complaining about. As for things that are completely worthless and full of evil, I can only grit my teeth and hate that I can't destroy them.

The impact of contemporary communications and the Internet on travel is something for those who study society and human behavior to ponder. The following are just a few examples.

There is a so-called Dunbar number, which states that the maximum number of people a person can have stable contacts with is about 150. I used to have hundreds of contacts in my phone, but phones are often damaged and lost. Every time they are lost, the phone book is lost. Within a year, a batch of contacts will come back, because there will always be someone who will contact me within a year, so I will write it down. Or after two or three years, when the phone book has 200 entries, the phone will be lost again. However, in recent years, I have learned to save the phone book through the Internet, so the entries have increased rather than decreased, which is annoying. Sometimes when I open the phone book while traveling and see the names of relatives and friends listed, I feel happy. Although I don’t need to contact them immediately, I know that if I want to contact them, I can reach them at my fingertips. How relieved it is. Or when I pass by a place, I immediately remember that there is a certain friend or acquaintance there. Although I will not disturb them, I always feel comfortable.

These are the benefits, but on the other hand, it makes people feel crowded. I won't say much about this in order to avoid offending many people. Let's just say that there are social networks nowadays, both in wide area networks and in local area networks. In these micro-networks of relationships, people's behavior can sometimes be very strange. For example, the so-called "sharing" is originally a good thing, but when it gets serious, if you see a cat or dog with particularly round or flat ears, you will immediately take a photo and report it to your friends. In my opinion, this is actually a diversion of some kind of spiritual suffering. The consequence is that everyone gradually develops a strange attitude towards the world, thinking that the world is just fragments, and that watching is cognition. As a result, everyone is knowledgeable, and the real knowledge system is also in danger of being diluted by day and night infusion.

Fortunately, my friends are all people who know how to be restrained. They only share some experiences and insights occasionally, which are both beneficial to people's hearts and can increase real knowledge.

Another thing is the loss of unexpected surprises. I have no sense of direction and can't remember the way. In the past, when I went out, I asked for directions every three or five steps, and I often went the wrong way. Since I started using GPS navigation, I have gone the wrong way less and less, and unexpected surprises have become less and less. Many people have important tasks, so they need accurate routes, but I am different. I am just a leisurely person, why do I need the "best route"? Although I know this, I can't help it. Tools always have this effect on people. Now when I go out, I always bring a map book to help me choose the road. Although I also use navigation, I always intervene and try to make it realize my intentions. Navigation software is much more stubborn than me. In every dispute, it always wins, so I have no choice but to follow the moon.

In the past, people said that there are a thousand roads leading to Rome. Among those who use navigation software, there is only one road to Rome. The Internet is not only capable of this, it can also help us book hotels far away. In a city, there are many hotels, why book this one instead of that one? Usually we always refer to other people's comments, and these comments can be seen by me and others, so people's behavior becomes more and more similar to each other, or they are unaware of it, or as mentioned before, they know it but cannot extricate themselves. In the Internet, no matter what function a person uses, no matter how special the method is, you can rest assured that you are not alone, there must be thousands of people who are the same as you, because the methods are limited to a few, and the so-called special cannot surpass the design of the software. The difference between the world on the Internet and the real world, or the influence of the Internet on our handling of affairs in the real world, may lie in this. I like the Internet, we all like the Internet, and I have indeed never seen or heard of it - at least in the experience of previous generations, there is nothing that threatens free will more than this. The Internet makes people free, but at the same time it reduces the ways to use freedom. This is really a strange thing.

Last month, I downloaded a photo processing software. Its "filter" is very powerful. Ordinary photos, after being processed by it, immediately become artistic, as if some spiritual qualities flow into them after we touch them with our fingers. I insisted that this was impossible, but I was amazed at its effect. One of the reasons why I insisted that art would not be produced in this way is that each of its effects has been used by countless people. When you go to its website, you can immediately see tens of millions of pictures that look artistic and very similar. Only then did my appreciation ability awaken slightly. Before this, when I looked at it alone, I almost really thought that the shabby photos I took could become works of art with just a little processing.

New trip

Thucydides was quite proud of his historical writing. He said, "I did not write down any story I heard casually. I did not even dare to take what I saw as absolute. What I wrote was either my own experience or what was told to me by other eyewitnesses. I have checked all these materials carefully. Even so, it is sometimes not easy to get to the truth. There are no strange stories in my history books, because I do not want to cater to people's temporary curiosity, but to pass them on to future generations."

His words were not spoken out of thin air. One of the people he targeted was Herodotus, a historian of the previous generation. Thucydides said that his conclusions were far more reliable than those of poets and historians who wrote in prose, because poets exaggerate and historians care more about the interests of their audience than the truth. These criticized prose historians, undoubtedly, include Herodotus.

Well. Let's look at Herodotus. First of all, he was a great traveler. Some people have calculated that his whereabouts, whether in the north-south or east-west direction, exceeded 5,000 miles. That was 2,500 years ago. Whether by sea or land, the ruggedness is unimaginable to modern people. Moreover, even in the same physical world, due to the difference in knowledge, the unknowns faced by the ancients are not the same as today. Confucius was born only a few decades earlier than Herodotus. He traveled around the countries for more than ten years. He did not go south to the Yangtze River and did not cross the Yellow River to the west (the Yellow River course was different at that time). On today's map, he only traveled within the three provinces of Shandong, Henan, and Anhui. It was very hard and he even went hungry occasionally.

Herodotus named his work "History". In his language, this word has the meaning of exploring the truth. Judging from his style, he really gave himself the mission of explaining events, but at the same time, perhaps in order to please the audience as Thucydides said, he did record everything he heard, and there were many lace things in his works. To be safe, he always said that I have never seen this thing, but the Egyptian priest told me, and I have never seen the golden statue, but I heard it from the Chaldeans. More often, he even omitted this. Compared with Confucius, who did not talk about strange and chaotic things, Herodotus' style was the opposite. Herodotus said different things when he saw, heard different things, and heard different things when he heard things. Herodotus did half of it.

Herodotus had been to Egypt, and the volume he wrote about Egypt was the most detailed. For example, he recorded: "When one goes up from Elephantine again, the land rises, so people need to tie a rope to each side of the boat in this part of the river, just like a man pulling an ox, so that when they go upstream, if the rope breaks, the boat will be carried back downstream by the force of the current." He probably saw a towman for the first time, so his writing was fresh and interesting. But his habit was to write down even things he didn't believe in, as long as they were new and interesting, so when he wrote about some places he had never been to, or areas he had only visited briefly, there were many hearsays.

He went to the Scythian region between the Danube and the Don, but his travels were limited. The region was large enough and unfamiliar enough to the people of Asia Minor, so his account was inevitably bizarre. Without mentioning the long passage about the Scythians blinding their slaves in order to obtain mare's milk (complete nonsense and indecent), he only seriously recorded that a man was found in a cave with the upper body of a snake and the lower body of a woman, and there was a tribe where all the people, both men and women, were bald from birth. How different this was from his description of the Egyptians catching crocodiles.

However, I have only read Thucydides' history briefly once, but I have read Herodotus' history two or three times with great interest.

I still vaguely remember the first time I read Herodotus's "History" (translated by Wang Yizhu) when I was young. At that time, I was even more ignorant of ancient Greece than I am now. I had only read a collection of myths and a little Homer before, so I was completely confused about the ins and outs of the Greco-Persian War. It was these strange stories that attracted me. To me, it is a kind of detailed "Classic of Mountains and Seas". I just hate that Herodotus was stingy with words when describing the Amazons, and did not care whether the story could be true. James new and strange world is likely to be made up of rumors and imaginations, and is very different from our actual history in nature. At certain times, it is more attractive, and in certain circumstances, our human nature to feel this attraction may not be explained or suppressed by frivolous and low tastes. The frontier of human actual life and the frontier of imagination are, after all, the same frontier. Although imagination cannot provide a real map, it is like a devil, taking us to places we don't want to go. There are always individual pioneers in every human exploration, but behind it is a common imagination that has been passed down from generation to generation. For most of us, even if we cannot be there in person, joining this common fantasy is also a good experience.