Riding the rails--Clifford Pyncheon interview part one

Hi nerds! Today I’m doing something a little different. My housemate Clifford recently had an eye-opening experience, and he wants to share it with you all. So we’re going to do an interview!

Brief bio: Cliff Pyncheon was falsely (we’re pretty sure about this) imprisoned for many years, and even when he finally came home, he never got out much. But he’s super interested in technology, and he’s very optimistic about the future of our society. Remind you of anyone? ;)

NH: Hey Cliff, thanks for joining us.

CP: I’m happy to be here.

NH: So you recently took a train trip…

CP: Yes. My sister and I went out to the country for a little afternoon getaway, and it had just occurred to me that this admirable invention of the railroad—with the vast and inevitable improvements to be looked for, both as to speed and convenience—is destined to do away with those stale ideas of home and fireside, and substitute something better [180].

NH: Interesting. You know how I’m all for doing away with stale ideas. What is this “something better” you have in mind?

CP: Well, my impression is that our wonderfully increased and still increasing facilities of locomotion are destined to bring us round again to the nomadic state. You are aware, my dear sir—you must have observed it in your own experience—that all human progress is in a circle; or, to use a more accurate and beautiful figure, in an ascending spiral curve. While we fancy ourselves going straight forward, and attaining, at every step, an entirely new position of affairs, we do actually return to something long ago tried and abandoned, but which we now find etherealized, refined, and perfected to its ideal. The past is but a coarse and sensual prophecy of the present and the future [180-181].

NH: Well, that’s certainly one way to look at it. Everything old is new again, eh? Like vinyl records and suspenders—and well, most of the things on this blog. Do you really think that the railroad will make people move out of permanent homes and just perpetually wander?

CP: Why should he make himself a prisoner for life in brick, and stone, and old, worm-eaten timber, when he may just as easily dwell, in one sense, nowhere—in a better sense, wherever the fit and beautiful shall over him a home?

I really think that these railroads—could but the whistle be made musical, and the rumble and the jar got rid of—are positively the greatest blessing that the ages have wrought out for us. They give us wings; they annihilate the toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel! [181]

NH: I can’t say that you’re entirely wrong there, Cliff. Spiritualized travel—I like that. I think you can see evidence of that in everything from college-age backpacking trips to shows like No Reservations. No doubt that whole thing got started during the age of the railroad. Just another thing you oh-so-modern hipsters have to thank us nineteenth-centuriers for. You’re welcome.  

Stay tuned for part two of the interview, when we talk about the telegraph, and things get really interesting!