Pennsylvania Station's Everlasting Ruin: On Marshall Berman's Tales of Old New York

摘要

"Notes from Underground," the Dostoevskian essay by Marshall Berman, ranges through time and space, between missing and misplaced connections, from Plato's allegorical cave to Giovanni Battista Piranesi's imaginary prisons to Charles Follen McKim's "great murdered" Pennsylvania Station in New York. But what of it? These are all troubling interiors in which we are made to lose our senses, and where we still lose our way. They are structures of experience that promise but also defeat the possibility of finding a way out. No exit. No, that conclusion has been arrived at by other lines of philosophical discourse, and with a different denouement. Berman was nothing if not original, even or perhaps especially when selectively rewriting Goethe's Faust. He has his own internal monologue to relate, at no risk of self-betrayal, for it is one that opens up into the spaces of mass transit. His confession of faith in the modernism of the streets is stitched through warren-like subways and a storied railroad terminal, the history of its destruction fatally accelerated by the proposed sale of the undeveloped air rights above it. Alas, poor Marshall. All that is solid ...