Christopherr Ross, philosopher and traveller, decided to cease his journeyings and go underground, quite literally. Seeking an antidote to incurable restlessness he chose to work for a year as a Station Assistant on Platform 6 (northbound Victoria Line) at Oxford Circus Station. After Training School, where he is taught how not to electrocute himself and always to look in the eye a member of the public as they are assaulting you, he faces up to his new duties with a mixture of curiosity and foreboding. What, exactly, will he find deep under the surface of London? "Tunnel Visions" is a mixture of lived experience in the surreal world of London's Underground and the more elevated ideas, thoughts and imaginings that experience provokes. Oxford Circus Station, complete with its weeping wall, its streakers, buskers, onanists and cupboard containing one employee whose ideal working day was to sleep soundly 100 feet below ground, is a Plato's Cave of reflection and human comedy.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
After ten years spent travelling around the world, Christopher Ross came back to England and decided to get a job which was sufficiently menial that he could think and observe at the same time, while avoiding the danger of being taken over by a corporate mindset. Soon he was a station assistant at Oxford Circus station on the London Underground. While checking the safety equipment, announcing delays and calming furious commuters his mind was engaged on matters such as the nature of truth, the possibility of choice and the different types of breakfast available around the world. Written in a series of short interlinked chapters, this is the record of Ross's outer and inner life during his time at 'Oxo'. He writes plainly but vividly, and has a talent for creating memorable images: the suicide on the tracks, and the station supervisor inching forward with his hands in front of his face to look down at the body; the pauper in Bombay to whom he gives a lit sparkler on the way to a New Year's Eve party: 'I turned and looked back. The crippled street beggar was spinning around and around on his skateboard, laughing madly and tracing infinity signs in phosphorescent white light against the black of the last night of the year.' He moves smoothly between the events on the Underground and the wide-ranging thoughts they inspire in him; from delays on the line to the subjectivity of time, from the station assistants' uniforms to the discrepancy between appearance and self. His real interest is the nature of intellectual freedom, and the possibility of attaining it. The highly regimented Underground system is the ideal setting for his meditations, as he watches its thousands of passengers hurrying down their accustomed routes, roused from their emptiness of mind only when incited to fury and bewilderment at the news that their usual passage to the Central Line is flooded, and they will have to take an alternative route. His observations are by no means always original, but his clarity of mind and perpetual self-questioning ensure that they are never banal, and many will remain with you long after you have finished reading. Surprising, entertaining and stimulating, this book will make you take a fresh look at the world around you. (Kirkus UK)
About the Author
Christopher Ross lives in Oxfordshire. Tunnel Visions is his first book.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A beautiful, philosophical, eminently approachable book.,
By Semioticghost "Semioticghost" (London, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Tunnel Visions: Journeys of an Underground Philosopher (Hardcover)
Christopher Ross is astute, perceptive and witty, without laying the latter on too thickly. He invites the reader into the workings of his mind, providing observations and speculations combined with a running commentary on what he witnesses daily and reflections on past experience. The end product is a beautiful, philosophical, eminently approachable book.
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