Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Self Portrait Abroad

Every time I travel,I feel a very slight feeling of dread at the moment of departure, a dread sometimes shaded with a soft shiver of elation. Because I know that any trip brings with it the possibility of death—or of sex (both highly improbable of course, yet not to be excluded altogether.


I realized that time had passed since I'd left Kyoto. And if this affected me so deeply on that day, it was not only because my senses, numbed by the prevailing grayness and the alcohol in my blood, naturally put me in a melancholic frame of mind, it was also because I suddenly felt sad and powerless at this brusque testimony to the passage of time. It was hardly the result of conscious reasoning, but rather the concrete and painful, fleeting and physical feeling that I myself was part and parcel of time and its passing. Until then, the feeling of being carried along by time had always been attenuated by the fact that I wrote - until then, in a way, writing had been a means of resisting the current that bore me along, a way of inscribing myself in time, of setting landmarks in the immateriality of its flow, incisions, scratches.


In Hanoi, the traffic punctuates each hour of the day and almost every hour of the night. The noise of car horns never stops in the streets, it forms a permanent background noise like an uninterrupted murmur that you could almost forget if it didn't keep coming back at you, it being precisely the function of horns to attract attention, to signal and warn, to drown each other out, outhonk one another. Thousands of horns blow without a moment's silence on the streets, shrill and loud, sharp and repetitive, insistent, some quick and piercing, fired off nearby in impatient salvoes, others remote, lost, muted by their distance, mainly from mopeds and motorcycles, but also from cars and taxis, tarpaulined trucks and three-wheeled vehicles, buses and vans and sometimes even—lost in the middle of an intersection, hardly audible in the surrounding turmoil— the delicate and isolated tinkle of a bicycle bell.