The Meanness
Travel did many things to a person, but the one thing it did most successfully was break a person down. Admittedly, my travel experiences were not very representative. My experience with travel was Central Asia. Central Asia, then, broke a person down. It did so first by exhilaration. Was this place real? Was I really here? It did so next by exhaustion. Nothing was easy, and each hassle and bribe and malfunction and injustice took something of one's spirit, bent it, made it meaner. Then came the most brutal breakdown of all: the knowledge of how easily one could live within that meanness.
Tom Bissell
Chasing the Sea
