[3] THE COUNTRY FLANEUR & BUS RIDER PAR EXCELLENCE



"It is becoming hard to walk the earth” [Walk About the Villages].Nonetheless, the ex-author does so for long stretches. Many of the finest sections of the book reprise the sense of walking as “the king of slowness,” as in Repetition (1987), mention  makes us make “sense of place” yet another theme, since the many locations in Moravian are so distinctly and memorably rendered.

I have added "bus rider par excellence" because it is my guess that no writer of note has ever described riding in buses and especially bus passenger as has Handke. After all, not to have a driving licence, or to be able to obtain one is the kind of rarity that only afflicts those with vision problems, and why Handke has those eyes problems - the colors he sees change, see The Lesson of St. Victoire for this. He himself at that time sought to find whether this as a problem that afflicted other members of his family, I have not run across what he discovered. But this unusual visual problem may be related to what Handke calls his occasionl 'autistic episodes"  - at any event not driver's license means Handke needs to be chauffeured around or take the bus. I chauffered him twice in New York in the mid-70s. If  you look at his accounts of his several triops to  get a drift on what is transpiring in the disintegrating Yugoslavia of the 1990 you will note that on each occasion Handke is being chauffeured around by friends. I will also put some quotes here in a day or so. from the great bus riding section in Part I  of MORAWIAN.


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