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“The difference is that a station is a place where a train passes through, on the way to somewhere else. A terminal, as the name suggests, is the end of the line.”
“The art school, though. They say it’s haunted.” Totto’s eyes were narrow slits. “An art teacher was killed in a train crash and all the artwork was destroyed. They say the ghost of the artist haunts the place, and no matter how hard Penn Central tries, no one will rent it.”
The hierarchy in the art world had been established hundreds of years ago: Oil painting trumped watercolors, portraits trumped landscapes. And all of that, summed up as “fine” art, trumped commercial art. Illustrators lay at the very bottom of the totem pole.
Did you know that they used to roll out a red carpet for passengers on the Twentieth Century Limited, which ran between Chicago and New York? That’s where the phrase ‘roll out the red carpet’ comes from.”
“The train carrying the works from New York to Chicago crashed, ended up in a river. A horrible accident. All the paintings were destroyed, and the art dealer who represented the artist died on the train, along with Levon Zakarian. It was easy enough to put two and two together.
Ever since, Clyde’s work has been attributed to Zakarian.”
Memento mori, where an object in the artwork served as a warning of death. Usually, it was
a skull or an hourglass, a bowl of rotting fruit.
Funny how art acted as a separation between those who deemed themselves cultured and those who did not.
America needs more gathering places, like pubs.
It offers a sense of community that otherwise we don’t have, wandering about in our own little worlds, disappearing into our flats at night.”
Virginia’s life up until last year had been about mitigating risk, doing nothing out of the ordinary, all while holding the people and things she loved as close to her as possible. Too close, it turned out. She’d learned the hard way that growth and change were unavoidable. Only once she’d undertaken her own crusades had everything fallen into place.
