Reinhard Mucha
Wartesaal , 1979-82/1997 (1983)
Details, photos by jasparLkw 1997, Kassel
 
 

The specific pleasure of travelling is not being able to stop off along the way when one is tired, it is to render the difference between departure and arrival not insensible, but as profound as possible, feeling it in its totality, intact, just as we felt it within us when our imagination carried us from the place we lived to the heart of a desired place, in a leap which we found miraculous less because it spanned a distance than because it united two district individualities of the earth, leading us from a name to another, and schematizing (much better than a scroll, where, since one disembarks at will, there is hardly any arrival) the mysterios operation fulfilled in thos special places, railway stations, which are almost not part of the city but which contain the essence of its personality just as they bear its name on a lettered sign ...

Alas, these marvelous places, railway stations, whence one leaves for a faraway destination, are also tragic places; for if it is there that the miracle whereby the countries which as yet had no existence in our though become those admist which we live, for that very reason, upon leaving  awaiting room, we must renounce the idea of soon regaining the familiar chamber where we were just a moment before. We must leave all hope of returning to bed in our own home, once we have decided to enter the fetid cavern that gives access to the mystery, in one of those great glass-roofed workshops like that of Saint-Lazare where I went to board the train to Balbec, and which raised above the disemboweled city one of those immense raw skies heavy with the accumulated threat of fdrama, like unto to certain skies by Mantegna or Veronese, of an almost Partisian modernity, beneath which could only unfold some terrible and solemn act like a departure in a railroad train or the erection of a cross.

- Marcel Proust

The above passage are quoted by R.M. in the dX Kurzfuehrer.

Back to Reinhard Mucha Page

jasparLkw2000