Illustration from A Marriage for Love (1891)
"A travelling incarceration. Immobile inside the train, seeing immobile things slip by. What is happening? Nothing is moving inside or outside the train.
"The unchanging traveller is pigeonholed, numbered, and regulated in the grid of the railway car, which is a perfect actualization of the rational utopia. Control and food move from pigeonhole to pigeonhole: 'Tickets, please ...' 'Sandwiches? Beer? Coffee? ...' Only the restrooms offer an escape from the closed system. They are a lovers' phantasm, a way out for the ill, an escapade for children ('Wee-wee!') -- a little space of irrationality, like love affairs and sewers in the Utopias of earlier times."--Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (1980)