At the ripe old age of 31, my complete lack of knowledge about and enthusiasm for driving surprises many. Cars - symbols of industrialistcapitalistcolonialist america! And as the president of the environment action group in my junior college days (an 8 member-strong incarnation of Captain Planet, determined to recycle every scrap of torn love letters and mis-applied lecture notes our peers so carelessly discard), perhaps a small voice of protest still remains.
Most probably it's just laziness. Plus the truth is, drivers miss out on so much that happens on public buses and trains. Well, nothing actually HAPPENS on buses and trains. Arrivals and departures. Conversations on the mobile phones. Many gameboy battles lost and won. Lovers doing some public loving. But mostly naps...people dozing off, dreaming private dreams. Nothing happens, and everything happens.
Just last week, we attended a conference on taiwanese filmmaker
Hou Hsiao Hsien as part of the SIFF's retrospective on him. Taking the cue from Hou's latest film, Cafe Lumiere, the first paper used Hou's scenes of train stations and train cabins to trace what really is the writer's own personal jresponse to cinematic sublimity and quiet. The writer made an interesting observation: that every time cars appear in Hou's films, it's a sign that something bad is going to happen. Trains are the location for occasions of silent, almost transcendent, love and union. Once inside cars, lovers break up, all relations crumble.
I repeat: Take the train. Don't drive.
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