Paul Theroux - To the Ends of the Earth - The Selected Travels

“I don’t blame anyone for leaving here,” said a farmer in Dunquin. “There’s nothing for young people. There’s no work, and it’s getting worse.”

After the talk of the high deeds of Finn MacCool and the fairies and leprechauns, the conversation turns to the price of spare parts, the cost of grain, the value of the Irish pound, which has sunk below the British one. Such an atmosphere of isolation is intensified and circumscribed by the language — there are many who speak only Gaelic. Such remoteness breeds political indifference. There is little talk of the guerrilla war in Northern Ireland, and the few people I tried to draw out on the subject said simply that Ulster should become part of Eire.

But no one mentions religion. The only indication I had of the faith was the valediction of a lady in a bar in Ballyferriter, who shouted, “God bless ye!” when I emptied my pint of Guinness.

On the rainiest day we climbed down into the cove at Coumeenoole, where — because of its unusual shape, like a ruined cathedral — there was no rain. I sent the children off for driftwood and at the mouth of a dry cave built a fire. It is the bumpkin who sees travel in terms of dancing girls and candlelight dinners on the terrace; the city slicker’s triumphant holiday is finding the right mountaintop or building a fire in the rain or recognizing the wildflowers in Dingle: foxglove, heather, bluebells.

And it is the city slicker’s conceit to look for untrodden ground, the five miles of unpeopled beach at Stradbally Strand, the flat magnificence of Inch Strand, or the most distant frontier of Ireland, the island off Dunquin called Great Blasket.

Each day, she and her sister islands looked different. We had seen them from the cliffside of Slea Head, and on that day they had the appearance of seamonsters — high-backed creatures making for the open sea. Like all offshore islands, seen from the mainland, their aspect changed with the light: they were lizard-like, then muscular, turned from gray to green, acquired highlights that might have been huts. At dawn they seemed small, but they grew all day into huge and fairly fierce-seeming mountains in the water, diminishing at dusk into pink beasts and finally only hindquarters disappearing in the mist.

CORSICA IS FRANCE, BUT IT IS NOT FRENCH. IT IS A mountain range moored like a great ship with a cargo of crags a hundred miles off the Riviera. In its three climates it combines the high Alps, the ruggedness of North Africa, and the choicest landscapes of Italy, but most dramatic are the peaks, which are never out of view and show in the upheaval of rock a culture that is violent and heroic. The landscape, which furnished some of the imagery for Dante’s Inferno, has known heroes. The Latin playwright Seneca was exiled there, Napoleon was born there, and so — if local history is to be believed — was Christopher Columbus (there is a plaque in Calvi); part of the Odyssey takes place there — Ulysses lost most of his crew to the cannibalistic Laestrygonians in Bonifacio — and two hundred years ago, the lecherous Scot (and biographer of Dr. Johnson) James Boswell visited and reported, “I had got upon a rock in Corsica and jumped into the middle of life.”

The landscape is just weird enough to be beautiful and too large to be pretty. On the west are cliffs that drop straight and red into the sea; on the south there is a true fjord; on the east a long, flat, and formerly malarial coast with the island’s only straight road; on the north a populous cape; and in the center the gothic steeples of mountains, fringed by forests where wild boar are hunted. There are sandy beaches, pebbly beaches, boulder-strewn beaches; beaches with enormous waves breaking over them, and beaches that are little more than mud flats, beaches with hotels and beaches that have never known the pressure of a tourist’s footprint. There are five-star hotels and hotels that are unfit for human habitation. All the roads are dangerous, many are simply the last mile to an early grave. “There are no bad drivers in Corsica,” a Corsican told me. “All the bad drivers die very quickly.” But he was wrong — I saw many and I still have damp palms to prove it.

On one of those terrible coast roads — bumper-scraping ruts, bottomless puddles, rocks in the middle as threatening and significant as Marxist statuary — I saw a hitchhiker. She was about eighteen, very dark and lovely, in a loose gown, barefoot, and carrying a basket. She might have been modeling the gown and awaiting the approach of a Vogue photographer. My car seemed to stop of its own accord, and I heard myself urging the girl to get in, which she did, thanking me first in French and then, sizing me up, in halting English. Was I going to Chiappa? I wasn’t, but I agreed to take her part of the way: “And what are you going to do in Chiappa?”

“I am a naturiste,” she said, and smiled.

“A nudist?”

She nodded and answered the rest of my questions. She had been a nudist for about five years. Her mother had been running around naked for eleven years. And Papa? No, he wasn’t a nudist; he’d left home — clothed — about six years ago. She liked the nudist camp (there are nine hundred nudists at Chiappa); it was a pleasant, healthy pastime, though of course when the weather got chilly they put some clothes on. Sooner than I wished, she told me we had arrived, and she bounded toward the camp to fling her clothes off.

At Palombaggia, the tourist beach a few miles away, I hid behind a pine tree and put on my bathing trunks. I need hardly have bothered — the beach was nearly deserted. Rocks had tumbled into the sea, making natural jetties, and I decided to tramp over a dune and a rocky headland to get a view of the whole bay. There were, as far as the eye could see, groups of bathers, families, couples, children, people putting up windbreaks, strollers, rock collectors, sandcastle makers — and all of them naked. Naked mommy, naked daddy, naked kiddies, naked grandparents. Aside from the usual beach equipment, it was a happy little scene from idealized prehistory, naked Europeans amusing themselves, Cro-Magnon man at play. It was not a nudist camp. These were Germans, as bare as noodles, and apart from the absence of swimming togs, the beach resembled many I have seen on Cape Cod, even to the discarded Coke cans and candy wrappers. I stayed until rain clouds gathered and the sun was obscured. This drove the Germans behind their windbreaks and one woman put on a short jersey — no more than that — and paced the beach, squinting at the clouds and then leering at me. I suppose it was my fancy bathing trunks.

NEW YORKERS SAY SOME TERRIBLE THINGS ABOUT THE subway — that they hate it, or are scared stiff of it, or that it deserves to go broke. For tourists it seems just another dangerous aspect of New York, though most don’t know it exists. “I haven’t been down there in years” is a common enough remark from a city dweller. Even people who ride it seem to agree that there is more Original Sin among subway passengers. And more desperation, too, making you think of choruses of “O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark.…”

“Subway” is not its name, because strictly speaking more than half of it is elevated. But which person who has ridden it lately is going to call it by its right name, “The Rapid Transit”? You can wait a long time for some trains and, as in the section of T. S. Eliot’s “East Coker,” often

… an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations

And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence

And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen

Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about …