I don't know where that might lie.
Beauty?
I would love her with all my heart, if only she were a goddess and immortal.
Money?
I hate it as you hate God.
Well, then, what do you love, you strange outsider?
I love the clouds … the clouds that pass by… over there… over
there… those lovely clouds!
The clouds usher in tranquillity. Below us are enemies and colleagues, the sites of our terrors and our griefs, all of them now infinitesimal, mere scratches on the earth. We may know this old lesson in perspective well enough, but rarely does it seem as true as when we are pressed against the cold plane window, our craft a teacher of profound philosophy and a faithful disciple of the Baudelairean command:
Carriage, take me with you! Ship, steal me away from here!
Take me far, far away. Here the mud is made of our tears!
5.
There was, apart from the motorway, no road linking the service station to other places—not even a footpath. It seemed to belong not to the city nor to the country, either, but rather to some third, travellers' realm, like a lighthouse at the edge of the ocean.
This geographical isolation enforced the atmosphere of solitude in the dining area. The lighting was unforgiving, bringing out pallor and blemishes. The chairs and seats, painted in childishly bright colours, had the strained jollity of a fake smile. No one was talking, no one admitting to curiosity or fellow feeling. We gazed blankly past one another at the serving counter or out into the darkness. We might have been seated among rocks.
I remained in one corner, eating fingers of chocolate and taking occasional sips of orange juice. I felt lonely, but for once it was a gentle, even pleasant kind of loneliness, because rather than unfolding against a backdrop of laughter and fellowship, which would have caused me to suffer from the contrast between my mood and the environment, it had as its locus a place where everyone was a stranger, where the difficulties of communication and the frustrated longing for love seemed to be acknowledged and brutally celebrated by the architecture and lighting.
The collective loneliness brought to mind certain canvases by Edward Hopper, which, despite the bleakness they depict, are not themselves bleak to look at but rather allow the viewer to witness an echo of his or her own grief and thereby to feel less personally persecuted and beset by it. It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love.
In 1906, at the age of twenty-four, Hopper went to Paris, where he discovered the poetry of Baudelaire. He was to read and recite the Frenchman's work throughout his life. The attraction is not hard to understand: the two men had shared interests in solitude, in city life, in modernity, in the solace of the night and in the places of travel. In 1925, Hopper bought his first car, a secondhand Dodge, and drove from his home in New York to New Mexico; from that point on he spent several months on the road every year, sketching and painting along the way, in motel rooms, in the backs of cars, outdoors and in diners. Between 1941 and 1955, he crossed America five times. He stayed in Best Western motels, Del Haven cabins, Alamo Plaza courts and Blue Top lodges. He was drawn to the sorts of places whose neon signs blink ‘Vacancy TV, Bath' from the side of the road, offering beds with thin mattresses and crisp sheets, large windows overlooking car parks or small patches of manicured lawn, the mystery of guests who arrive late and set off at dawn, brochures for local attractions in the reception area and laden housekeeping trolleys parked in silent corridors. For meals Hopper would stop at diners, at Hot Shoppes Mighty Mo Drive-ins, Steak ‘N' Shakes or Dog ‘N' Suds, and he would fill up his car at petrol stations displaying the logos of Mobil, Standard Oil, Gulf and Blue Sunoco.
And in these ignored, often derided landscapes, Hopper found poetry: the poésie des motels, the poésie des petits restaurants au bord d'une route. His paintings (and their resonant titles) suggest a consistent interest in five different kinds of travelling places:
1. HOTELS
Hotel Room (1931)
Hotel Lobby (1943)
Rooms for Tourists (1945)
Hotel by a Railroad (1952)
Hotel Window (1956)
Western Motel (1957)
2. ROADS AND PETROL STATIONS
Road in Maine (1914)
Gas (1940)
Route 6, Eastham (1941)
Solitude (1944)
Four-Lane Road (1956)
3. DINERS AND CAFETERIAS
Automat‘(1927)
Sunlight in a Cafeteria (1958)
4. VIEWS FROM TRAINS
House by the Railroad (1925)
New York, New Haven and Hat-ford‘(1931)
Railroad Embankment (1932)
Toward Boston (1936)
Approaching a City (1946)
Road and Trees (1962)
5. VIEWS INSIDE TRAINS AND OF ROLLING STOCK
Night on the El Train (1920)
Locomotive (1925)
Compartment C, Car 293 (1938)
Daivn in Pennsylvania (1942)
Chair Car (1965)
Loneliness is the dominant theme here. Hopper's figures seem far from home; they sit or stand alone, looking at a letter on the edge of a hotel bed or drinking in a bar, gazing out the window of a moving train or reading a book in a hotel lobby. Their faces are vulnerable and introspective. Having perhaps just left someone or been left themselves, they are in search of work, sex or company, adrift in transient places. It is often night, and through the window come the darkness and threat of the open country or of a strange city.
In Automat (1927), a woman sits alone drinking a cup of coffee. It is late and, to judge by her hat and coat, cold outside. The room seems large, brightly lit and empty. The decor is functional, with a stone-topped table, hard-wearing black wooden chairs and white walls. The woman looks self-conscious and slightly afraid, unused to sitting alone in a public place. Something appears to have gone wrong. She unwittingly invites the viewer to imagine stories for her, stories of betrayal or loss. She is trying not to let her hand shake as she moves the coffee cup to her lips. It may be eleven at night in February in a large North American city.
Automatic a picture of sadness, and yet it is not a sad picture. It has
Edward Hopper, Automat, 1927
the power of a great melancholy piece of music. Despite the stark-ness of the furnishings, the location itself does not seem wretched. Others in the room may be on their own as well, men and women drinking coffee by themselves, similarly lost in thought, similarly distanced from society: a common isolation that generally has the beneficial effect of lessening the oppressive sense within any one person that he or she is alone in being alone. In roadside diners and late-night cafeterias, hotel lobbies and station cafes, we may dilute our feeling of isolation in a lonely public place and hence rediscover a distinctive sense of community. The lack of domesticity, the bright lights and anonymous furniture may come as a relief from what are often the false comforts of home. It may be easier to give way to sadness here than in a living room with wallpaper and framed photos, the decor of a refuge that has let us down.