… people go quiet in the underground. It’s the...

… people go quiet in the underground. It’s the only time we experience a combination of 21st-century technology (the trains), 19th-century technology and vision (the tunnels, the network) and our paleolithic deep self. A person on the underground is experiencing the rare chance to be a 21st-century Victorian caveman. She is doing something we don’t value enough, in the contemporary world: she is travelling in a direction we don’t prize. She is going down and in. Down under the ground, and down into the self; into the city, into the world, into the streets and also into herself. That, finally, is what the tube does most and does best. It takes us down and in.

— Guardian, John Lanchester rides the London Underground