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This absence is not just a visual one; for some reason it gives me a frisson. Dickens makes both the presence and the absence of the man in the window eerie with an eeriness that only he is capable of. This window in Victorian London could, in spirit, be a window in a painting by Hopper, in which figures are immanent with the same strangeness, but in their transitoriness (the hotel room, the "bagage mince") threaten as eloquent an absence as Dickens' figure.

A similar feeling comes from a more lyrical description by Osbert Sitwell:

"from the train...approaching London in the evening you would note a lighted window in a row of shuttered houses and a single figure standing, with a curious, pleading solitariness, outlined in the glow".

No. In modern times the figure alone in his room is by no means a symbol of serenity and spiritual health; he (for it is always a man who opts for what Kundera calls this "cocquettish solitude") is an emblem of urban angst, be he Tony Hancock, fumbling autodidactically through the Introduction to Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy; or Robert de Niro assembling an assault rifle in Taxi Driver; or Leonard Cohen in his days of bedsitter angst (or his latter days of duplex angst). Man alone in his room is the emblematic modern man, a bit of a poseur, Gallic posturing of an existential kind; the heroes of de Montherlant, the hero of La Nausee, of Camus. The figure of the man alone is a typically modern one; it is the room or the streets: as Gautier writes

Par l'ennui chasse de ma chambre
J'errais le long du boulevard"

or Balzac:

"only one passion could ever drag me from my studious routine....
I used to go out in order to observe life in the faubourg"...

or Lamb:

"often have I rushed out into the Strand and fed my humour, till tears have wetted my cheek"

or Dickens:
"I can't explain how much I want these (streets).

   
 

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