I sit there making plans. A train ride to the city by the coast, I spend a few hours sitting by the docks and watching boats come and go. I can’t shake this stillness, this silence. I am apart, and everything is happening around me. I buy a ticket for a boat, the overnight crossing.
It can seem bewildering, the sudden onset of night. Alone amongst strangers. In the city with the windows open and the dark falling over us, we can see our lives reflected across to other windows, as images. Lit up in windows we turn off the lights, to be visible shadows only.
The ideas form slowly, one glimpse at a time. I become attuned to the contrasts. I am entranced by the light and the colours of the landscape. Although it speaks of what is absent, it is never still, always changing. The changes are slow, immeasurably slow and yet the scene around me alters with every hour, every moment, every fall of the light.
Colette writes beautifully about the passing landscape, the feel of travel, and of letting go, of seeing the changing scenery unfold. There is real life and feeling to this writing: ‘Half asleep, like the sea, and yielding to the swaying of the train, I thought I was skimming the waves, so close at hand, with a swallow’s cutting flight.’
Ruthie begins to find a greater awareness of fragility, of instability and impermanence. To stay still in the book, is to be caught up in the ordered time of the domestic. It can be a way to hold the past at a distance and keep out the ghosts of those who are absent or lost. For Ruthie and Sylvie, these fragments of memory threaten to overwhelm the present, and a life of drifting become a way of comprehending the ghosts of the past, of keeping them alive through movement.
I knew then that the streets had already started to seep under my skin. It is something to do with motion, and the repeated retracing of steps. In the same way I keep returning to Rhys, and to the way she has infiltrated into my own experience.
Old Paris leaves its clues everywhere, like the way the old street names remain in some places, only crossed out.
The Street Walks In 