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  • The Paris Review

    The Moment of Distraction

    by Amit Chaudhuri Sep 21, 2018 3 minutes

    This is the final installment of Amit Chaudhuri’s column, The Moment.

    Last year, I commuted between Oxford and Norwich, where I teach in the autumn. On Mondays, I took a train via London; on Tuesday evening, I took the same route back. It’s a four-hour-journey: you travel south and then go up again.

    On the trains I read work by students, skimmed through the , charged my phone (the London-Norwich train is old but is allocated with power sockets), wrote emails, applied finishing touches to pieces I’d written, talked to my wife and a couple

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