Leisure • Small Pleasures
The Pleasures of the Underground
There are moods – of dissatisfaction and loneliness, panic and despair – when the very best counsel we might be offered is to go and take a ride on the underground, probably in mid-afternoon, on one of the less travelled lines, not in order to go anywhere in particular in the outer world but to try to reach certain new and kinder places in the inner one.
How could we have predicted, twenty minutes ago, that we would be on this particular brightly lit rumbling stage with this specific set of actors seated so close that we can hear them swallow. We pretend not to look but how avidly we are – of course – studying everything. There are new combinations at every stop: a veterinary nurse next to a goth, an airline pilot next to an imam, a five year old child next to an octogenarian. The broad message is clear: the world is various, reality is unforeseen, everything is so deeply peculiar. Here no one cares who might have said what to whom in our relationship, no one has any interest in our professional frustrations or the tensions with our parents or children. Our self-absorbed panics that mattered so much in the world above are as nothing in the pitch black tunnels lit up with reflections for adverts boasting of solutions to baldness, insomnia and the menopause. We are a blessedly anonymous and indistinct monad in a rattling kaleidoscope. We can find peace not by striving for certainty or ever more significance but by coming to terms with our beautifully negligible place in a boundlessly restless and mysterious urban universe.
In the silence, we can contemplate our fellow humans with new sympathy. A dentist from Hendon might spend the period between Bond Street and Green Park sitting next to a lathe operator from Ohio – to whom he might have had so much to say. A pair of new lovers – still astonished that they have found one another – sit directly across from someone going through a protracted divorce. An elderly individual, heading to a consultation tracking the state of a worrying tumour, was once a teenager; and their neighbour, pressed so close, and on their way to art school, will one day be old: their unique existences separated only by an inch of stale air and a few layers of cloth. A child seems to be delightedly counting the stops and perhaps imagining that the train is flying through space. We’ll never know exactly what is going through anyone’s mind but – for a moment – we’re struck by one of the greatest of all thoughts: that the inward reality of an absolute stranger is just as vivid and complex and hard to describe as our own.
There’s an outflow of good will. We know the rules but we’d love to smile and say something benign; to wish our fellow travellers well. They’ll never know that for a short but important time, as we rattled thirty metres below a department store or electricity substation, they were the object of our expansive tenderness. And, with even greater poignancy, we ourselves will never know what kindness was wished upon us by certain of our companions. If we let ourselves, our hearts might burst open with compassion for the human condition: for the unbearable intertwining of tragedy and joy, despair and hope. In The Divine Comedy, Dante imagined a journey below the earth’s surface as a tour of hell. Technology and good manners have transformed a realm of fear into a place of silent communion and redemption.
Along the way, our journey provides unusually good opportunities for thinking. We rarely think well when we’re simply left to our own devices in a study with silence and a blank of sheet of paper. But something about the constant motion and the entrances and exits helps to distract the nervous, censorious parts of our minds that quashes all our originality, giving more wayward and creative thoughts a chance to break through. With our eyes half closed, between stations, opposite two Ghanaians carrying implausibly large rucksacks, we properly rethink our options in a relationship or what we might do next with the project in Spain. While covertly studying an old lady cleaning her glasses, we finally imagine a way to get a colleague on side.
We’re not meant to be pleased to be down here, of course. When people first travelled on underground trains, in the early 1860s, the miracle was obvious and some would wave their hats in gratitude to the planners, engineers and workers who had made it possible. Today we forget about awe and even a modest hurrah would seem like a sign of insanity. To think we might reserve the term ‘luxury travel’ only to those going about in tiny metal boxes constantly stopped in the traffic above when this leviathan pulls four hundred people from 0 to 30mph in 10 seconds and never hits a junction. We overlook that, thanks to the minute contributions of millions of travellers, the city has been able to afford to create an express train that blithely passes under a river, a detail that would certainly detain a Martian or a five year old child. It can be easy to give up on humanity; but a bit less so after one has properly taken in the majesty and prowess of a carriage by Metro-Cammel or Bombardier, all the more impressive for being owned not by some jealous and secretive tycoon, but by every citizen who has ever bought a ticket.
One of noblest ambitions of culture – of the visual arts and poetry – has always been to reawaken our slumbering appreciation of wonders to which familiarity has closed our hearts. But we are in error if we suppose that the places we need to go in order to wake to the majesty of existence is the library or the gallery. There’s an innocent, but fatal, snobbery that suggests that great experiences happen only in rare and elevated places; that we will find the meaning of life in a fragile manuscript or in a canvas so precious it must be protected by bullet proof glass.
And yet what the great writers and artists have always been frantically signalling is that we should open our eyes to what is all around us already. We might, for greater and deeper impact, head to the nearest underground station and take a short, but potentially life transforming, trip from Swiss Cottage to Canada Water.
