,n. cubiculum, conclave interius, sanctuarium principis, it. gabinetto. antikencabinet, münzcabinet numotheca: „du zeigest dich so grosz im cabinette, als auf der siegesbahn und deinem ehrenbette.“

GÜNTHER 730.

Entnommen demWörterbuch von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm

Das Onlinemagazine Cabinet gehört zu den Besten seiner Art. Es macht immer wieder Spaß darin zu stöbern.

Gestern fand ich dort den Artikel über die London Necropolis Railway.

Sie „belieferte“ den Friedhof Brookwood mit Leichen und den dazu notwendigen Trauergästen. „ The funeral trains originally ran once a day (64,000 people were buried at Brookwood in its first twenty years), although by the 1930s it was unusual for the trains to operate more than twice a week. They left the private station at Westminster Bridge Road and joined the London & South Western Railway’s main line for the hour-long journey, and then reversed into the cemetery grounds at Brookwood. There were two stations to greet them there: North Station, which served Nonconformists, and South Station, for Anglicans, who occupied by far the larger part of the cemetery. Each station had its own licensed bar. (…)

Irgendwie fiel mir dabei sofort wieder Thomas Pynchon ein: "Inside the carriage, which is built on several levels, he sits in velveteen darkness, with nothing to smoke, feeling metal nearer and farther rub and connect, steam escaping in puffs, a vibration in the carriage´s frame, a poising, an uneasiness, all the others pressed in around, feeble ones, second sheep, all out of luck and time: drunks, old veterans still in shock from ordnance 20 years obsolete, hustlers in city clothes, derelicts, exhausted women with more children than it seems could belong to anyone, stacked about among the rest of the things to be carried out to salvation. Only the nearer faces are visible at all, and at that only as half-silvered images in a view finder, green-stained VIP faces remembered behind bulletproof windows speeding through the city...(…) ruinous secret cities of poor, places whose names he has never heard... The walls break down, the roofs get fewer and so do the chances for light. The road, which ought to be opening out into a broader highway, instead has been getting narrower, more broken, cornering tighter and tighter until all at once, much too soon, they are under the final arch: brakes grab and spring terribly. It is a judgment from which there is no appeal."

Gravity´s Rainbow, Page 3

Das oben bereits erwähnte Zitat von GÜNTHER

„du zeigest dich so grosz im cabinette, als auf der siegesbahn und deinem ehrenbette.“

bekommt eine ganz unerwartete Wendung, kennt man erst die Geschichte dieser Bahn. Die einen nennen es wohl Siegesbahn und Ehrenbette, die andern schlicht Necropolis Railway.