The House by the Railroad

House by the Railroad, by Edward Hopper, 1925.
(https://www.edwardhopper.net/house-by-the-railroad.jsp)

Ed Hopper makes me feel things.

The House by the Railroad makes me think of hill-town houses of my childhood, houses filled with antiquities, and plushy armchairs. The train tracks in the front of the house give it a certain sadness. It takes me back to a moment a couple of weeks ago, when a loved one and I sat on a railway platform, having a troubled conversation, and suddenly a passing train made the wild grass at the tracks sway-the stretch of long grass just swayed, silently, and the train, when it went by in its speed and glory, remained unaware of this nodding that it had just induced in lesser and immobile entities than itself. That night, as is my habit, I chose to look at Hopper’s paintings on an app before I went to bed, and The House by the Railroad was one of them. This time, a melancholia I associate with movement struck me, and I thought of the grass and the railroads from my evening. Melancholia. Isn’t this why we love art? Because we see in the grandest of depictions contain in it glimpses of our mundane everydayness?

The House by the Railroad makes me think of afternoon lights. A summer afternoon in a stuffy room, the air sick-sweet with the smell of fennel seeds, and lemon-scented perfumes. Melancholia again. There is a sense of anticipation in the painting- maybe a train is to pass by? Maybe a guest is expected? Though various interpretations of the painting describe the painting as being vacant, to me it seems inhabited. There is a certain sadness around it that I associate with houses where too many people have lived for too many years, and where for too many nights and days, too many stories have been told and lamented over. The sadness of the circle of life.

The House by the Railroad captures what would be a moment in a person’s memory of it. But then, isn’t every painting an expression of a particular moment and our remembrance of it? In spite of all this, I wasn’t exactly sure why of all of Hopper’s paintings, this was the one I chose to think of. Nighthawks is certainly the most popular and glamourous one. I enjoy wondering about lives through window-scenes that any one of the numerous New York window scenes should have been my favourites. The answer presented itself to me one evening.

The house on my street has a dark doorway. It’s lit only by an incandescent bulb, and the door itself is fixed in a cranny between two walls. A faded sketch of Ganapati hangs over the door. One evening, just as the street lights were coming on, I passed by the house, and at that moment, a young boy was standing at the doorway, evidently having just knocked on the door. A woman had opened it, and her silhouette was framed against the light from within the house, while the boy –who seemed like he was coming home from a day of work- was illuminated only partially by the gloomy light from the bulb. This was the moment, this was all I saw.

But we are perceptive beings- we read into situations and give meanings to a fleeting vision to make sense of it, or simply to imbibe the world with an emotion more than just apathy. The story I gave for the moment was that of a young boy, home from work, his expectant mother opening the door for him, and then, a simple dinner, a harmless gossip about some obscure family member, and then a TV show, whose loud presenter wore a bright outfit that jarred with the badly designed studio and which in turned the walls of the house itself a pandemonium of iridescent colors.

I do not imagine the House by the Railroad to have a doorway that is lit by a cloudy bulb. But the late afternoon lights and shadows on the painting is evocative of a late evening winding up of a day’s activities too. In the afternoon, the House looms silently over the Railroad, perhaps the inhabitants inside are asleep. The house on my street prepares itself for this silence at dusk, with the return of the son and a dinner. The sadness of a moment, perceived at different times of the day, in entirely different times and spaces- one by Hopper, immortalized in the form of a painting, and the other, inconsequentially observed by a woman on her evening walk.

And yet, for a moment to evoke a painting in the mind, or for the painting to evoke two separate moments- there lies the story.

I continue to look at the House by the Railroad often. And as life plays out every day in front of me in all its seemingly normal flows and curves, l am sure that these are not the last stories that the House has to show to me.