The View From the Train Read Online Free Page A

its ‘pendant’ ‘Landor’s Cottage’, which describe respectively the creation of a superlative landscape garden by an individual of exemplary endowments, and an idyllic cottage inhabited by an idyllic couple in an idyllic setting. There is no other purpose to these works than these descriptions. In ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, the greater part of the writing is description of the narrator’s delirium as he hovers on the edge of consciousness, and most of the rest details his gradual awareness of the awful particularities of the dungeon into which he has been cast. In ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, the place and the state of mind of its residents are even more inextricably bound up, though not this time in the first person, for the narrator is a guest: ‘I know not how it was – but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible.’
    With this observation, Poe distances the narrator from the reader, who cannot help imagine some ‘poetic’ gloom precisely because it will only exist in his imagination. Poe is pinpointing a rather photographic dilemma – for photographs of unpoetic gloom, provided they are good photographs, generally make it look rather poetic whether this is the intention or not, as in war reportage and so on. The narrator goes on: ‘I looked upon the scene before me … with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium – the bitter lapse into everyday life – the hideous dropping off of the veil.’ 17
    Here he compares a particular state of mind with that followingthe loss of another, again a kind of paradox. But this is typical, for Poe is at his best when describing not just the heightened states of mind of his characters, but the anguish which their (and presumably his) sensibilities bring about in their everyday lives. Thus, of Roderick Usher:
    He suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses; the most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture; the odours of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light; and there were but peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with horror. 18
    Throughout Poe’s work, there is an implication that those who have access to heightened states of awareness are bound to suffer. Delirium is the result of illness or injury (‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, ‘The Oval Portrait’), persons of extreme sensibility suffer (‘Usher’), are haunted by irrational fears (‘The Premature Burial’), or turn to drink and murder (‘The Black Cat’), and those who cultivate the senses in the face of suffering and adversity invite destruction nonetheless (‘The Masque of the Red Death’). He seems especially familiar, like the narrator in ‘Usher’, with the depression encountered when any heightened state departs.
    This is a recurring theme in Baudelaire. In ‘The Double Room’, one of the prose poems of
Paris Spleen
, the room is an idyllic space; the light, the furnishings and the company are sublime, but then little memories of current circumstances alter this perception: ‘And that perfume out of another world which in my state of exquisite sensibility was so intoxicating? Alas, another odour has taken its place, of stale tobacco mixed with nauseating mustiness. The rancid smell of desolation.’ 19 There is a political dimension to this:
    Each subjectivity is different from every other one, but all obey the same will to self-realisation. The problem is one of setting their variety in a common direction, of creating a united front of subjectivity. Any attempt to build a new life is subject to two