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Time Machine
Sep. 29th, 2012 05:29 pmIf you had a time machine, where would you go? Right now, I'm gunning for Coney Island; I've been reading John Kasson's Amusing the Million and Luna Park sounds simply irresistible, the fairy tale architecture limned in electric lights at night.
(Note to self: must stop using the word 'limned' all the time.)
But the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 pioneered that use of electric lights; and it too has a strong pull on me. It would be a splendid place to take a time machine.
And if I'm going back to the 1890s, most of all I'd want take a train to Boston to visit Josephine Preston Peabody, dreamer, poet, and delightfully wry diarist. “I doubt not that the time will come when, instead of going to a Symphony, even on a stand-up, I shall derive immense spiritual joy from dusting the whole lower floor with a smile upon my face."
I'm having trouble deciding what to quote. An outburst of proto-feminist outrage? Or the overflow of joy at an accepted poem, an unexpected trip to England, even just a beautiful day? Wistful longing after companionship - or a whimsical letter outlining for a friend a lovely outing they should take - or exultation in the bliss of solitude?
Or almost all of the above?
“But how a walk on a day like this shows me that delight of – what? Dryad-life?...I only mean that, walking in the wind, over the snow, the opal wintry sky smiling at one – one cannot understand how people ever wish to fall in love – how they can ever be married. ‘Oh,’ I said to myself -- ‘Even if you loved any one enough, it would be imprisonment in a garden! How can you belong to anybody, anybody!’”
I want to make Peabody a centerpoint of my dissertation. I have no idea how to do this, or how to justify it; but damn, I really want to.
(Note to self: must stop using the word 'limned' all the time.)
But the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 pioneered that use of electric lights; and it too has a strong pull on me. It would be a splendid place to take a time machine.
And if I'm going back to the 1890s, most of all I'd want take a train to Boston to visit Josephine Preston Peabody, dreamer, poet, and delightfully wry diarist. “I doubt not that the time will come when, instead of going to a Symphony, even on a stand-up, I shall derive immense spiritual joy from dusting the whole lower floor with a smile upon my face."
I'm having trouble deciding what to quote. An outburst of proto-feminist outrage? Or the overflow of joy at an accepted poem, an unexpected trip to England, even just a beautiful day? Wistful longing after companionship - or a whimsical letter outlining for a friend a lovely outing they should take - or exultation in the bliss of solitude?
Or almost all of the above?
“But how a walk on a day like this shows me that delight of – what? Dryad-life?...I only mean that, walking in the wind, over the snow, the opal wintry sky smiling at one – one cannot understand how people ever wish to fall in love – how they can ever be married. ‘Oh,’ I said to myself -- ‘Even if you loved any one enough, it would be imprisonment in a garden! How can you belong to anybody, anybody!’”
I want to make Peabody a centerpoint of my dissertation. I have no idea how to do this, or how to justify it; but damn, I really want to.
