It was the basilica of gossip, the Vatican of inside dope.

A determined soul will do more with a rusty monkey wrench than a loafer will accomplish with all the tools in a machine shop.

It was a secular cathedral, dedicated to the rites of travel.

Transportation made sublimation literal. It conveyed evil to another world.

For the machine meant the conquest of horizontal space. It also meant a sense of that space which few people had experienced before – the succession and superimposition of views, the unfolding of landscape in flickering surfaces as one was carried swiftly past it, and an exaggerated feeling of relative motion (the poplars nearby seeming to move faster than the church spire across the field) due to parallax. The view from the train was not the view from the horse. It compressed more motifs into the same time. Conversely, it left less time in which to dwell on any one thing.