Abstract
For Clifford Pyncheon in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851), a man who had been housed in the past, riding on a fast-moving passenger train lets loose a torrent of rapturous predictions about how modern technologies might liberate the human mind from the limitations of the material body: “‘These railroads — could but the whistle be made musical, and the rumble and the jar got rid of — are positively the greatest blessing that the ages have wrought out for us. They give us wings; they annihilate the toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel!’” (287) This “spiritualization”, he noted, was contingent on eradicating “the rumble and the jar” of train travel, presumably because they returned one to the discomforts of the body and restrained the free play of the mind.
[M]emory is a material record;… the brain is scarred and seamed with infinitesimal hieroglyphics, as the features are engraved with the traces of thought and passion.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘Mechanism in Thought and Morals’, 1871
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© 2010 Jane F. Thrailkill
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Thrailkill, J.F. (2010). Railway Spine, Nervous Excess and the Forensic Self. In: Salisbury, L., Shail, A. (eds) Neurology and Modernity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230278004_5
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