第111页 Chapter VIII: Railway Navigation and Incarceration

对一个incarceration-vacation狂热者来说，这一章里旁征博引笔落惊风的de Certeau是神吗？？？好家伙这这这简直是散文诗，打得过十个Alain de Botton的那种……
The unchanging traveller is pigeonholed, numbered, and regulated in the grid of the railway car, which is a perfect actualization of the rational utopia.
Only a rationalized cell travels. A bubble of panoptic and classifying order, a closed and autonomous insularity - that is what can traverse space and make itself independent of local roots.
Inside, there is the immobility of an order. Here rest and dreams reign supreme. There is nothing to do, one is in the state of reason.
Between the immobility of the inside and that of the outside a certain quid pro quo is introduced, a slender blade that inverts their stability. The chiasm is produced by the windowpane and the rail. These are two themes found in Jules Verne, the Victor Hugo of travel literature: the porthole of the Nautilus, a transparent caesura between the fluctuating feelings of the observer and the moving about of an oceanic reality; the iron rail whose straight line cuts through space and transforms the serene identities of the soil into the speed with which they slip away into the distance. 
These are two complementary modes of separation. The first creates the spectator's distance: You shall not touch; the more you see, the less you hold - a dispossession of the hand in favor of a greater trajectory for the eye. The second inscribes, indefinitely, the injunction to pass on; it is its order written in a single but endless line: go, leave, this is not your country, and niether is that - an imperative of separation which obliges one to pay for an abstract ocular domination of space by leaving behind any proper place, by losing one's footing.
The windowglass and the iron (rail) lines divide, on the one hand, the traveller's (the putative narrator's interiority and, on the other, the power of being, constituted as an object without discourse, the strength of an exterior silence.
As invisible as all theatrical machinery, the locomotive organizes from afar all the echoes of its work. Even if it is discreet and indirect, its orchestra indicates what makes history, and, like a rumor, guarantees that there is still some history.
The machine is the primum mobile, the solitary god from which all the action proceeds. It not only divides spectators and beings, but also connects them; it is a mobile sym-bol between them, a tireless shifter, producing changes in the relationships between immobile elements.
In any case the blesses in trains are humble, compared to those in airplanes, to whom it is granted, for a few dollars more, a position that is more abstract (a cleaning-up of the countryside and fimed simulacra of the world) and more perfect (statues sitting in a aerial museum), but enjoying an excess that is penalized by a diminution of the ("melancholy") pleasure of seeing what one is separated from.
In the mobile world of the train station, the immobile machine suddenly seems monumental and almost incongruous in its mute, idol-like inertia, a sort of god undone.
Everyone goes back to work at the place he has been given, in the office or the workshop. The incarceration-vacation is over. For the beautiful abstraction of the prison are substituted the compromises, opacities and dependencies of a workplace.