« Home | Previous Post »
A Strange Vehicle
Early during her stay in Boston the Baroness Münster, ambitiously hoping to arrange a suitable new marriage with some purportedly rich American relatives, observes from her window at the inn a strange occurence. Just on the other side of the churchyard fence, she notices
As I lingered at the English-language shelf yesterday in my favorite Brno bookshop, I happened upon this passage. It couldn't be skipped or thrown aside of course, and I had to get the book: Henry James's The Europeans (1878). The novel is described as James's finest effort in articulating the difference between Old and New World society (explains the ever-so-helpful-and-informative Penguin Popular Classics introduction). These contrasts are interesting to read a century later, particularly for an American in Europe, but it was this wonderful description of public transport (on the second page!) that grabbed my attention.
Tags: transportation, books
an assemblage of Bostonians . . . trampling about in the liquid snow. Many of them were looking up and down; they apeared to be waiting for something. From time to time a strange vehicle drew near to the place where they stood &mdash such a vehicle as the lady at the window, in spite of a considerable acquaintance with human inventions, had never seen before: a huge, low omnibus, painted in brilliant colours, and decorated apparently with jingling bells, attached to a species of groove in the pavement, through which it was dragged, with a great deal of rumbling, bouncing, and scratching, by a couple of remarkably small horses. When it reached a certain point the people in front of the graveyard, of whom much the greater number were women, carrying satchels and parcels, projected themselves upon it in a compact body &mdash a movement suggesting the scramble for places in a lifeboat at sea &mdash and were engulfed in its large interior. Then the life-boat &mdash or the life-car, as the lady at the window of the hotel vaguely designated it &mdash went bumping and jingling away upon its invisible wheels, with the helmsman (the man at the wheel) guiding its course incongruously from the prow. This phenomenon was repeated every three minutes, and the supply of eagerly moving women in cloaks, bearing reticules and bundles, renewed itself in the most liberal manner.
As I lingered at the English-language shelf yesterday in my favorite Brno bookshop, I happened upon this passage. It couldn't be skipped or thrown aside of course, and I had to get the book: Henry James's The Europeans (1878). The novel is described as James's finest effort in articulating the difference between Old and New World society (explains the ever-so-helpful-and-informative Penguin Popular Classics introduction). These contrasts are interesting to read a century later, particularly for an American in Europe, but it was this wonderful description of public transport (on the second page!) that grabbed my attention.
Tags: transportation, books
Posted 13 April 2006 at 21:40.
A graduate student in music and anthropology writing a dissertation about music in Moravia, the eastern third of the Czech Republic. At some point, the Czech Republic's "second city" (that would be Brno) captured my attention, and I've since been blogging about events, arts, music, and other stuff—basically whatever interests me in and around the cityscape. I'm not living in Brno now, but I keep up with the cultural pulse from afar as best I can.
Comments:
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
8:29 AM, February 19, 2008
» Post a Comment