Tedium and travel
The narrator expresses that he finds tedium in travel as he has had so many experiences of traveling to different countries that he doesn’t find traveling exciting anymore. Ironically, most people like to travel to get out their tedious lives and get into something exciting.
The light falls only on the Stranger
Samil is trying to be a writer in his own country while the narrator is already popular in Tunisia even though he is a foreigner. We never recognize the beauty around us. Things look good from afar.
Avoiding present
The narrator mentions that everyone keeps talking about mundane things in their lives and not the train journey which they are currently having. They would talk about it afterwards with their friends. He feels that everyone wants to talk about past, while they should be talking about the present, as they can only influence present, not the past.
Russian mountain
The author compares the journey on the train to Russian Mountain, a rollercoaster ride in Brazil, as the journey is as stressful. While everyone in the group is excited to travel on the train, they soon get bored with no means of entertainment on the train, the constant motion and interference of Hilal. The narrator who was ready to ‘scale’ the Russian Mountain, now wants to avoid it as he knows how big the mountain is.
Time and Joy
Yao and the narrator observe that we want to stop the time when we have a happy moment and continue to live that way forever in our life, but what we don’t realize that keeping a moment stationary soon takes the magic out of that moment. The moment is not so magical anymore and we can’t be happy in it anymore.
