Traveling with Graham Greene

Reading Travels with my Aunt by Graham Greene. Greene is fuckin' brilliant. I swear. I'm reading his stuff on the train and I find myself dog earring every other page. Some of the stuff is some good, I want to slap myself on the knee and jump up and down and grab the person next to me and say "Can you believe this? You've got to read what this guys wrote here. Incredible."

This was one of my favorites:

pg 52: "One of the few remarks of age which I noticed in my aunt was her readiness to abandon one anecdote while it was yet unfinished for another. Her conversation was rather like an American magazine where you have to pursue a story, skipping from page twenty to page ninety-eight and turning over all kinds of subjects in between: childhood delinquency, some novel cocktail recipes, the love life of a film star, and even quite a different fiction to the one so abruptly interrupted."

Fucking brilliant!

Then there's this:

pg 97: "When a train pulls into a great city I am reminded for the closing moments of an overture. All rural and urban themes of our long journey were picked up again: a factory was followed by a meadow, a patch of autostrada by a country road, a gas-works by a modern church:the houses began to tread on each other's heels, advertisements for Fiat cars swarmed closer together, the conductor who had brought breakfast passed, working intensely down the corridor to rouse some important passenger, the last fields were squeezed out and at last there were only houses, houses, houses, and Milano, flashed the signs, Milano."

Oh God! Oh God! How awesome to read this. I will follow Greene anywhere with writing like that, he'll make even journeying into the pits of hell a god-damn song, tralalala-ing on his way down.