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Ways of travelling, seeing and reading …
I came across this painting, a painting from the Victorian age, while reading a thought by the English writer, poet and philosopher S. T. Coleridge (1772–1834) on the various types of readers existing then and now. Like in a mirror. What is striking in the image of these two women sitting in a carriage (a train?) about two hundred years ago? But it’s not a mirror. It is like in a “double”: while one reads, the other sleeps.
Maybe two sisters, maybe just one. It’s up to the viewer to decide. The scene, as the artist imagined it, seems to convey a very specific message with his painting. Two women, two opposing attitudes towards reading? In German this “double” is called “doppelgänger”, an existential characteristic present in every human being.
Do the two images represent the same person, at different times, or are they two contrasting behaviors towards reading? While one seems to represent an interest, a passion, a culture, the other describes a condition of the mind, a decision: that of idleness. Both are a choice, both for the same person and for each of us. I leave out the other observations on the painting which are still very interesting, see the bombast of the clothes, the view from the window, the reflections of light and more.
They would take us away from the topic that I intend to deal with in this post and which…
