For the enjoyment of a faintly literary melancholy there is no place like a train. One sits back, effortlessly casting away the tired landscape of an undesired world. Every sight is succulent food for bitterness: those suburbs like trenches with the wireless entanglements above them, the pillar boxes, the concrete, the sap heads of red London angling into the green country, the jab of a builder’s advertisement, some creamy-domed cinema, eight municipal trees. Beauty one wipes out of the mind before it can soak there and stain all, as one wipes tears from the eyes; but the ugly things, what a vicious pleasure they give, for they enhance the exquisite bitterness of one’s loneliness.
V.S. Pritchett, Marching Spain