fiat lux

Some high way service areas in Taiwan have free wireless access now. They have already been 24/7 with convenient stores and gas stations, and now they have free wireless access.

It’s hard to write about transits probably because that’s what they are. Travel literature is more about places like cities, towns, countrysides, or about sceneary, people in history, art objects, or events. Transportation means or transits are part of the travel, but they are more like the backdrop. It’s harder to imagine a trip solely consisting of airport or train station hopping (not that there ain’t people who do that, it’s just more fringe). We go viaJFK to NYC. If we go to JFK, it’s because we’re heading elsewhere. There was once I put my instant messenger nickname as “SFO-NRT mm/dd1-dd2″ and a friend of mine asked if I was doing an airport-hopping trip. He took things too literally.

Transits can be what the Japanese call “ma,” or in-betweenness. Transits are not associated with memory and are not worth being written or noted exactly because that’s what they’re for. A trip overflown with self-boasting photos or captured memory (how apropos that phrase is) is like being on an all-you-can-eat spree, resulting in too much. Transits are there to give people a breathing space, a nothingness in-between the two stops, the two meaningful meanings (or the meanings-that-I-intend-it-to-be). They are there to be tasteless.

Still, I like the fact they have free wireless access here. Being connected on the road is a different thing. One is at the same time cut off from the beingness of stops themselves but still gets the access. Scribbling or doddling in such ambience is like working in a newly-remade partition. And anyway it’s a memoryless area. Things simply feel, to bear their own very properties, transient.

lukhnos :: Dec.13.2006 :: bon-vivant :: 1 Comment »