The Art of Travel - Alain De Botton [15]
There are few other cars on the road, only an occasional set of lights moving in the opposite direction, away from the night. The car's instrument panel casts a purple glow over the darkened interior. Suddenly, in a clearing ahead, a floodlit expanse appears: a petrol station, the last before the road heads off into the longest, densest stretch of forest, and night completes its hold over the land—Gas (1940).
The manager has left his cabin to check the level on a pump. It is warm inside, and light as brilliant as that given off by the midday sun washes across the forecourt. A radio may be playing. There may be cans of oil neatly lined up against one wall, along with sweets, magazines, maps and window cloths.
Like Automat, painted thirteen years before it, Gas is a picture of isolation: a petrol station stands on its own in the impending darkness. But in Hopper's hands, the isolation is once again made poignant and enticing. The darkness that spreads like a fog from the right of the canvas, a harbinger of fear, contrasts with the security of the station itself. Against the backdrop of night and wild woods, in this last outpost of humanity, a sense of kinship may be easier to develop than in daylight in the city. The coffee machine and magazines, tokens of small human desires and vanities, stand in opposition to the wide nonhuman world outside, to the miles of forest in which branches crack now and then under the footfalls of bears and foxes. There is something touching in the suggestion—made in bold pink on the cover of one magazine—that we paint our nails purple
Edward Hopper, Gas, 1940
this summer, and in the imprecation above the coffee machine to sample the aroma of freshly roasted beans. At this last stop before the road enters the endless forest, what we have in common with others can loom larger than what separates us.
7.
Hopper also took an interest in trains. He was drawn to the atmosphere inside half-empty carriages making their way across a landscape: the silence that reigns inside while the wheels beat in rhythm against the rails outside, the dreaminess fostered by the noise and the view from the windows—a dreaminess in which we seem to stand outside our normal selves and to have access to thoughts and memories that may not arise in more settled circumstances. The woman in Compartment C, Car 2ßj (1938) seems in such a frame of mind, reading her book and shifting her gaze between the carriage and the view.
Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is before our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, and new thoughts, new places. Introspective reflections that might otherwise be liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape. The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do; the task can be as paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand. Thinking improves when parts of the mind are given other tasks—charged with listening to music, for example, or following a line of trees. The music or the view distracts for a time that nervous, censorious, practical part of the mind which is inclined to shut down when it notices something difficult emerging in consciousness,
Edward Hopper, Compartment C, Car 2ßj, 1938
and which runs scared of memories, longings and introspective or original ideas, preferring instead the administrative and the impersonal.
Of all modes of transport, the train