“Hell is other people.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre
Has such a sentiment flitted across your mind while you huddled in a crowded CTA bus?
Or when you were forced to overhear your neighbor’s chatty cell phone conversation on the “L”?
Or withstand the grating voice of that Metra conductor announcing for the umpteenth time that “This train will not go to Ravinia … “
How could it not?
Most people who commute just burrow into the BlackBerry, the book or newspaper, and tune out the annoyances of the nattering world.
But now the London Tube’s Piccadilly line is breaking through the static. British subway drivers and other staffers have been issued manuals of quotations from famous authors and philosophers, including the above quote from Sartre.
They’re encouraged to blurt out one or two to the assembled passengers whenever the urge seizes them. So riders may hear nuggets of wisdom like these: “Nothing is worth more than this day.” (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe). Or: “There’s more to life than increasing its speed.” (Mohandas Gandhi). That last one sounds particularly appropriate for CTA trains.
Ideally, passengers will be inspired or entertained — transported by the power of great philosophy and literature.
What a terrific idea. Mayor Richard Daley is always looking for innovative concepts to borrow from the Europeans, such as wrought iron fences and flowered boulevards.
This one looks like a natural, with a proviso: This isn’t London. This is the city of Terkel and Algren and Bellow. This is also the city of Hinky Dink and Bathhouse John, a city of pols on the make, of fractured syntax and wise-guyisms.
So why not supply conductors and drivers here with a book of Chicago’s greatest quotes?
The drivers could entertain riders with this classic by Mayor Richard J. Daley, delivered about the riot-scarred 1968 Democratic convention: “The policeman isn’t there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder.”
Of course there’s a trove of material from the current mayor, including this 2001 classic on whether he could withstand the increased scrutiny of the newly appointed U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald: “Scrutiny? What else do you want? Do you want to take my shorts? I get scrootened every day …”
Then there’s the campaign slogan a reporter once suggested for the late 1st Ward Ald. Fred Roti, who was known as the mob’s voice on the council: “Vote for Roti and nobody gets hurt. “And this story recounted by Tribune columnist John Kass about the assassination of Mayor Anton Cermak:
An aide told Northwest Side ward boss Charlie Weber that Cermak had been shot in Miami.
“Is he dead yet?” Weber asked.
“I don’t know,” the aide replied.
“Well, put a hunnert under his nose, and if he doesn’t twitch, then you know he’s gone.”
There’s the classic line from former U.S. Rep. Abner Mikva’s first lesson in Chicago politics. One night in 1948, he said, “I stopped by the ward headquarters in the ward where I lived. There was a street-front, and the name Timothy O’Sullivan, Ward Committeeman, was painted on the front window. I walked in and I said, ‘I’d like to volunteer to work for Stevenson and Douglas.’
“This quintessential Chicago ward committeeman took the cigar out of his mouth and glared at me and said, ‘Who sent you?’ I said, ‘Nobody sent me.’ He put the cigar back in his mouth and he said, ‘We don’t want nobody nobody sent.'”
Chicago has a million lines, a million quotes. CTA drivers could recite them and challenge riders to name the source.
“I am leaving for St. Petersburg, Fla., tomorrow. Let the worthy citizens of Chicago get their liquor the best they can. I’m sick of the job — it’s a thankless one and full of grief. … I’ve been spending the best years of my life as a public benefactor.”
Who said that?
Al Capone, 1927.
The city “alive from snout to tail” (H.L. Mencken) has inspired a raft of great lines from great writers. One favorite is from Nelson Algren’s 1951 essay “Chicago: City on the Make”: “Yet once you’ve come to be part of this particular patch, you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”
If Chicago adopts this idea from London, we would suggest just one rule.
Every CTA train leaving Midway or O’Hare would launch with this exchange from the 1980 movie “The Blues Brothers”:
Elwood: “It’s 106 miles to Chicago. We got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark and we’re wearing sunglasses.”
Jake: “Hit it!”
Tell us what famous quotes or passages you’d like to hear on the bus or train at chicagotribune.com/voxpop
