He Began to Make Plans
From Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood:
He began to make plans. In a few days we were all three of us to leave Berlin, for good. The Orient Express would take us to Athens. Thence, we should fly to Egypt. From Egypt to Marseilles. From Marseilles, by boat to South America. Then Tahiti. Singapore. Japan.
Now that’s an itinerary!
It calls to mind the quote from Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine we used as an epigraph in Issue 1:
Where would you like to go, what would you really like to do with your life? See Istanbul, Port Said, Nairobi, Budapest. Write a book. Smoke too many cigarettes. Fall off a cliff but get caught in a tree halfway down. Get shot at a few times in a dark alley on a Moroccan midnight.
In Goodbye, the itinerary is proposed by a millionaire called Clive who seems willing to take his penniless Bohemian friends (Isherwood and “Sally Bowles,” the Liza Minelli character in Cabaret) on the journey of a lifetime to escape a Berlin about to be co-opted by the Nazis.
Clive pronounced the names as though they had been stations on the Wannsee railway, quite as a matter of course; he had been there already. He knew it all. His matter-of-fact boredom gradually infused reality into the preposterous conversation. After all, he could do it. I began seriously to believe that he meant to do it. With a mere gesture of his wealth, he could alter the whole course of our lives.
Sometimes all you need is money. But for the rest of us, there’s wit.
*
About Robert Wringham
Robert Wringham is the editor of New Escapologist. He also writes books and articles. Read more at wringham.co.uk