I saw Pepper's Ghost today
Aug. 25th, 2010 08:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
charameiFor those who don't know, Pepper's Ghost is the effect you get when you see something reflected onto a piece of transparent glass, allowing you to see both the reflection and the thing beyond. If you've ever looked out of the window from a brightly-lit room into a dark night and seen yourself, glowing slightly, overlaying the world beyond, you've seen Pepper's Ghost.
I saw Pepper's Ghost this morning, and I've been trying to express what moved me about it all day. Here goes:
I didn't see a person. I was sitting between next to the glass barrier between the door and the main seat rank in a mostly-empty Tube carriage (Londoners may find it easier if I just say I was in a priority seat), and because it was nine o'clock in the morning the carriage was full of abandoned newspapers.
Except the two seats I could see through the glass. They were empty... but the seats 90 degrees anticlockwise from them weren't. I saw the Pepper's Ghosts of two newspapers, aligned perfectly with the seats they were overlaying. One of them was even leaning on the armrest, jauntily and dog-earedly taking up as much space as a folded paper possibly can. (It was a Metro; you'd think the commuter paper would be more considerate. I mean, I'd expect this of the Mail or Sun, but really...!)
Two abandoned papers, already fading and ghostlike. Read by maybe a handful of people each, not wanted by anyone for more than a few minutes of entertainment.
And I keep thinking...
How many newspapers have been abandoned in those seats? How many headlines, how many stories to tell the world? How long? If I were to dig back far enough in the mountain of ghost papers that must silently fill every seat, just imagine the things I could read: death of Victoria. War, peace, Depression, war, victory, Communism... to say nothing of all the half-finished crosswords and Su Dokus that amounts to.
What a wealth of history has passed through those seats.
Hmm, that got a bit pretentious. Better go and write some crack to purge.
I saw Pepper's Ghost this morning, and I've been trying to express what moved me about it all day. Here goes:
I didn't see a person. I was sitting between next to the glass barrier between the door and the main seat rank in a mostly-empty Tube carriage (Londoners may find it easier if I just say I was in a priority seat), and because it was nine o'clock in the morning the carriage was full of abandoned newspapers.
Except the two seats I could see through the glass. They were empty... but the seats 90 degrees anticlockwise from them weren't. I saw the Pepper's Ghosts of two newspapers, aligned perfectly with the seats they were overlaying. One of them was even leaning on the armrest, jauntily and dog-earedly taking up as much space as a folded paper possibly can. (It was a Metro; you'd think the commuter paper would be more considerate. I mean, I'd expect this of the Mail or Sun, but really...!)
Two abandoned papers, already fading and ghostlike. Read by maybe a handful of people each, not wanted by anyone for more than a few minutes of entertainment.
And I keep thinking...
How many newspapers have been abandoned in those seats? How many headlines, how many stories to tell the world? How long? If I were to dig back far enough in the mountain of ghost papers that must silently fill every seat, just imagine the things I could read: death of Victoria. War, peace, Depression, war, victory, Communism... to say nothing of all the half-finished crosswords and Su Dokus that amounts to.
What a wealth of history has passed through those seats.
Hmm, that got a bit pretentious. Better go and write some crack to purge.