...of a journey

He was still looking out of the window. He watched the ground slide away along the sides of the bus, and his mind was a blank. Not everything moved at the same speed. First, nearest the window, were the embankments, springing forward so fast that one didn’t even notice them. The concrete poles, too, rapid, darting toward the rear like propeller blades. The low, sagging telegraph wires undulating with a vertical movement. After that, the houses, the fields, the walls. But they were still apparitions, openings, winks of the eye. White face, red face, pile of stones, white face, tree, tree, tree, white face, yellow face, pile of stones. A little farther away, the houses lumbered forward like huge trucks, like huge boats. The beige-coloured blocks floated above the trees, then veered aside, and became heavy, laden rafts as the current carried them away. The tops of the trees thrashed around, drooped, made their little leaves sparkle. Occasionally, a branch, higher than the others, stretched up and passed across the sky like the arm of a drowning man. Still farther away, the motionless hills, with their cubes of houses, their patches of fields. After that, the landscape was no longer motionless: it retreated. Enormous blocks of mountains, cliffs, reservoirs of the sea, capes, black islands. Their slow movement twisted the earth, ripped the forests and headlands. Lastly, overhead, in the sky, the clouds altered their shapes completely as they merged, then drew apart again.
The cumulative effect was one of dizziness. All these superimposed movements that were destroying the landscape were heavy, painful, tragic, filling the eyes and creating a hollow feeling in the pit of the stomach. The grumbling of the engine went on and on, constructing its own silence out of all the multiple waves that swarmed over you.
The world crumbled, very quickly and very slowly at the same time. And each departing thing stripped the back of your mind of an idea. Each uprooted tree fleeing towards the rear was a vanished word. Each house proffered for a single second, then spurned, was a desire. Each face of a man or a woman that had appeared in front of the window, had been repudiated in the same instant, was a strange mutilation, the abolition of a very tender, much beloved word.
He went on looking out of the window, lost for words.
Some were off in a flash, BOOK, CAT, CIGARETTE, the time it took two or three concrete poles to fall back. Others flew by interminably, WALL, IDEOLOGY, LOVE, INNOCENCE, while the black mountain slid forward, leaned, pitched forward, and gradually sank to earth. There were tattered cloud-ideas which disappeared mysteriously: they hovered in the sky like great birds, then, circle after circle of them, melted into space. And there were ant-ideas which swarmed among the tufts of grass, and which were crushed in millions by the headlong flight. Each mile he became more impoverished. Dumbness entered his body. Perhaps it was the engine’s noise, its regular throbbing that was sending waves through him.

[The Book of Flights, Le Clézio, J. M. G.]