Corridors

A 'love letter to an unloved place', broadcast in BBC Radio 3's Nightwaves, 22 June 2004.

What do you do in a corridor? Well, we know there is one thing you categorically must not do, for generations of schoolchildren have had the prohibition barked at them: ‘Don’t run in the corridor!’ It’s odd that this should be so, since the word corridor actually comes from Latin currere to run, the corridor being that part of a building which runs. There is something of the wind-tunnel in the corridor, which seems to promise the shortcut, the unswerving dash. It is surprising how often corridors are scenes of violence. It is very hard for makers of gangster films or thrillers to resist the temptation of shoot-outs in corridors. In how many films does the heroine flee down a corridor from her assailant, hair flying and strappy shoes clacking? How many times have we seen the shotgun barrel appear round the corner at the end of the corridor, turning it into a shooting range, turning it into the barrel of a gun. Computer games take their users down labyrinths of corridors and turnings.

It remains true, nevertheless, that corridors are retarders rather than accelerators of movement. In this lies much of their strangeness. Corridors are dilatory, displacing, and distempering. They are for dallying, lingering, hovering, and, most of all, for waiting. As one moves through or along a corridor, which in theory is there to provide quick and direct access to different locations on one floor of a building, the persons one meets in the corridor are usually waiting. I wonder that nobody has ever thought of setting Waiting for Godot in a corridor.

Of all built spaces, the corridor is the most temporal, the aptest to suggest both the inevitable running on of time, and its suspension. The passage of the years is often thought of as a long corridor, which also makes it possible to imagine the rooms off the corridor as stopping places. But T.S. Eliot uses the corridor to suggest a more sinisterly stalled, or snarled-up view of historical time in his poem ‘Gerontion’, which begins with the view that ‘History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors/And issues’. The corridor returns in Eliot’s work to suggest the nightmarish suspended animation of modern life, as for example in ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, with its evocations of

Smells of chestnuts in the streets,
And female smells in shuttered rooms,
And cigarettes in corridors
And cocktail smells in bars.

That corridors are places of dangerous irresolution, and uncertain purpose is suggested by the fact that Macbeth conducts his agonised reflections on how to effect ‘the be-all and end-all’ of Duncan’s murder in what the stage-directions specify as the corridor outside his guest’s room. Macbeth feels himself to be poised 'upon the bank and shoal of time', his corridor temporisings contrasting in his mind with the thought of ‘heaven’s cherubim hors’d/Upon the sightless couriers of the air'. That the corridor is a purgatorial place is also suggested by Robert Graves’s admonition in his poem written as a solider in the First World War:  

So when I’m killed, don’t wait for me,
Walking the dim corridor;
In Heaven or Hell, don’t wait for me,
Or you must wait for evermore.

via bbk.ac.uk