On the magic of arriving somewhere with your hair done and your nervous system still attached.
The flight would have taken fifty minutes. The train took six hours and twenty minutes, with a change in Lyon. I arrived calmer, better-read, and having eaten a very reasonable sandwich from the dining car.
I have become a person who takes the train. This is a choice I made two years ago, partly for the obvious reasons and partly because I had noticed something: I arrive at airports in a particular state. Tight in the chest. Slightly animal. Ready to be disappointed.
On trains I read. I watch the landscape rearrange itself. I have conversations with strangers that would never happen at 38,000 feet. I arrive somewhere and I know, in some physical sense, where I am relative to where I was.
This is worth, to me, the additional hours. It is also worth the additional cost of a sleeper car on long routes — the overnight train from Paris to the coast is one of the reliable pleasures of my year.