What Do Other Authors Say About the Cross-Country Driving Experience?

Verlyn Klinkenborg answers that question in this excerpt from her article "Coast to Coast Through Early 19th-Century England" published in the New York Times, January 21, 2005.

What kind of travel scenes do we see nowadays? Verlyn Klinkenborg answers that question in this excerpt from her article "Coast to Coast Through Early 19th-Century England" published in the New York Times, January 21, 2005.

To read the rest of Ms. Klinkenborg’s article discussing travel, the novel and George Sand’s “Middlemarch,” click on this New York Times link: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/21/opinion/21fri4.html?ex=1264050000&en=38a2e27d2c863407&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt

Travel Scenes

What kind of travel scenes do we see nowadays? Verlyn Klinkenborg answers that question in this excerpt from her article "Coast to Coast Through Early 19th-Century England" published in the New York Times, January 21, 2005:

To read the rest of Ms. Klinkenborg’s article discussing travel, the novel and George Sand’s “Middlemarch,” click on this link: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/21/opinion/21fri4.html?ex=1264050000&en=38a2e27d2c863407&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt

Every road trip is a narrative of sorts, or at least that's what we like to tell ourselves, in a Kerouac kind of way. But most trips are really nothing of the sort. The long-ago days when a cross-country driver could count on a flat tire to give him a close-up view of the countryside - when there were no freeways and the way West was along a two-lane highway - were, well, long ago. Now the narrative, such as it is, is the smooth hum of tires, refueling at automatic, credit-card-reading gas pumps, stopping for the night at motels that do their best to be unvarying coast to coast.

You have to drive quite a ways off the Interstate to get to a town that hasn't been distorted by the dark commercial gravity of so much traffic so near at hand. And even then it's hard to find a good place to eat. {end passage}
From article "Coast to Coast Through Early 19th-Century England" By VERLYN KLINKENBORG, EDITORIAL OBSERVER, The New York Times, January 21, 2005. (Article was about traveling west while listening to taped audio reading of book "Middlemarch," by George Eliot.)

{coninued, keep and use for Resource info later} My wife, Lindy, and I recently drove from our farm north of New York City to California. This trip had a narrative. It was called "Middlemarch," by George Eliot. We slipped the first cassette into the car stereo somewhere near Albany - "Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty ..." - and we finished the last one - "and rest in unvisited tombs" - somewhere between Bakersfield and Fresno. In heavy traffic, or when one of us wanted to sleep, we turned the novel off. The rest of the time we listened. It so happens that America is as wide as "Middlemarch" is long, at 70 m.p.h. along the southern route.

A novel is really a temporal creation. It is as much about the ways in which time passes in the story and in the reader's awareness of the story as it is about anything else. If you sat in a room and read "Middlemarch" or listened to it being read, you would become very aware of the time it took. But for us, the novel became a spatial creation. It was as though we were driving along a pavement of Eliot's sentences laid end to end across the country.