Books on trains aren’t to be read so much as looked up from periodically to catch brief snatches of life in country as they go by—a boy kicking a ball against a wall, a girl skipping and laughing down an alley, a woman washing vegetables, a man who sits and smokes—because books carry you someplace else, except that you’re already in transit, a traveler, and the greatest books are those you look up from most often, slowing time and motion, so that instead of killing time you prolong it for a bit and fully inbreathiate the moment.

This is the pleasure of distraction.