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Fed up of the crush on the Tube? Just be philosophical about it
THE London Underground is a mean and ruthless place, where the single-minded pursuit of a minuscule space crushed into some stranger's armpit can turn a decent human being into a silently-snarling beast.
In the words of the poet, there is no time to stand and stare, even if you aren't dashing to clock on. Woe betide the slow-moving tourist if they go near the transport system when rush-hour worker ants are revved-up and hell-bent on arrival.
The Tube is a necessary evil, that's all. When it's moving efficiently it's the fastest way of getting around London barring helicopter, and just about worth the sweatiness, crumpledness and general grime-in-the-pores that accompany the experience.
Travelling in London is one of the reasons those of us who live in more civilised spots love to come home to a gentler pace of life. Transport in parts of Yorkshire may have its problems, but no-one has yet had to resort to providing philosophy as a way of making the travelling experience a less barbaric one.
As of this week, service announcements on London Underground's Piccadilly Line are to include the words of great thinkers such as Gandhi, Einstein and Jean-Paul Sartre. Turner Prize-nominated artist Jeremy Deller has compiled What Is The City But The People? a booklet of quotations for Tube drivers to use when communicating with passengers. The initiative is an attempt to make travelling on the Underground more enjoyable and thought-provoking.
Poetry has long featured inside carriages, and the network has also promoted art in the Underground for many years. But I've never heard anyone break into conversation with their neighbour about a Picasso print or a great line from John Donne.
Unlike buses and trains around Yorkshire, the Underground is an island of unfriendliness – or is that London in general? – full of self-absorbed individuals separately enduring the awfulness
of it all.
Will a dose of Nietzsche stir the soul and provide comfort to those drowning in quiet desperation? Or will the hapless drivers on the Piccadilly Line become nothing more than laughing stocks, as they lend their untrained voices to the celebrated thoughts of great minds?
Some commuters and travellers in general, might feel that they would rather the drivers, as the frontline face of the organisation, simply showed a little more human empathy for passengers, rather than hiding behind uninformative announcements about either toasted sarnies or philosophical quotations.
As one recent London to Scotland passenger reported during a ride-from-hell that accumulated a three-hour delay:
"When a train guard actually decides to let their own frustration show a little it can make you feel better.
"On one journey, the chap got fed up of apologising for knowing nothing and confided to all that he felt like a jack-ass and was always the last to be told what was happening, and he too had a bed to get to, two hundred miles away. We were caught between a kind of appalled shock and a great feeling of empathy, and it did help to know that they were feeling exactly the same as us. I don't think spouting philosophy would have made anything better, though."
I suppose the guard could have waxed literary by throwing in John Steinbeck's "A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it." And had the member of staff in question been female, she might have curried a little more sympathy with Tammy Wynette's little pearl: "Sometimes it's hard to be a woman."
That's the thing about philosophy; the great philosophers have definitely not cornered the market. Songwriters, novelists, journalists, architects and even Ken Dodd have coined phrases that provoke thought. Some of their more user-friendly bon mots could definitely stir-up a conversation on a train full of friendly Tykes. Maybe some of these choices would even work in the frozen South:
Life, you know, is rather like opening a tin of sardines. We are all looking for the key – Alan Bennett
They say travel broadens the mind; but you must have the mind – GK Chesterton
The trouble with Freud is that he never played the Glasgow Empire Saturday night – Ken Dodd
In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the state – Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1974
The avant garde is dead. It's been marketed – Will Self
Where have all the flowers gone? – Pete Seeger
Human life begins on the far side of despair – Jean-Paul Sartre
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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