Railroads and buses and travel and Proust : Aspects of the early modern age

Continuing thoughts on railroads in Proust - and the unusual idea that railroads convey a kind of "authority," in his (or translator Davis's) word for the narrator or protagonist - the at that time in history gave an unprecedented control or mastery of the landscape, even for or especially for the bourgeoisie, which did not "own" land in the same way that the nobility did, railroads in "Swann's Way" and later volumes of In Search of Lost Time therefore serving as an equalizer, but only up to a point, and only for a period of time. Today, cheap airfare is an "equalizer," in that people travel to more places and far more casually than ever before, but our resources are far from equal or equitable. A better analogy, for me, is with an earlier time in my life - thinking back to when I was about 13, old enough to move about on my own but not old enough to drive, and at that time train timetables and even more so bus schedules had for me a weird fascination: buses, roaming about kind of oddly, appearing here and there with the cryptic numerals and destinations - 30 Orange, 44 Gregory, Special! - seemed to be moving about randomly like pinballs but actually were on charted courses that a sage could discern, like the stars coursing through the heavens. And if you could master the code these buses could take you anywhere, they all connected. This time in my life somewhat analogous to the time of which Proust wrote and in which he lived - before autos, before air travel, early youth of the modern age.