The Prehistoric Railway Station

A railway station is an admirable place, although Ruskin did not
think so; he did not think so because he himself was even more
modern than the railway station. He did not think so because
he was himself feverish, irritable, and snorting like an engine.
He could not value the ancient silence of the railway station.

"In a railway station," he said, "you are in a hurry,
and therefore, miserable"; but you need not be either unless
you are as modern as Ruskin. The true philosopher does not
think of coming just in time for his train except as a bet
or a joke.

The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to be
late for the one before. Do this, and you will find in a railway
station much of the quietude and consolation of a cathedral.
It has many of the characteristics of a great ecclesiastical building;
it has vast arches, void spaces, coloured lights, and, above all,
it has recurrence or ritual. It is dedicated to the celebration
of water and fire the two prime elements of all human ceremonial.
Lastly, a station resembles the old religions rather than the new
religions in this point, that people go there. In connection
with this it should also be remembered that all popular places,
all sites, actually used by the people, tend to retain the best
routine of antiquity very much more than any localities or machines
used by any privileged class. Things are not altered so quickly
or completely by common people as they are by fashionable people.
Ruskin could have found more memories of the Middle Ages in the
Underground Railway than in the grand hotels outside the stations.
The great palaces of pleasure which the rich build in London all have
brazen and vulgar names. Their names are either snobbish, like the
Hotel Cecil, or (worse still) cosmopolitan like the Hotel Metropole.
But when I go in a third-class carriage from the nearest circle station
to Battersea to the nearest circle station to the DAILY NEWS, the names
of the stations are one long litany of solemn and saintly memories.
Leaving Victoria I come to a park belonging especially to St. James
the Apostle; thence I go to Westminster Bridge, whose very name alludes
to the awful Abbey; Charing Cross holds up the symbol of Christendom;
the next station is called a Temple; and Blackfriars remembers
the mediaeval dream of a Brotherhood.

If you wish to find the past preserved, follow the million
feet of the crowd. At the worst the uneducated only wear
down old things by sheer walking. But the educated kick them
down out of sheer culture.

I feel all this profoundly as I wander about the empty
railway station, where I have no business of any kind.
I have extracted a vast number of chocolates from