“Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.”
I can’t quite remember who recommended “A Week at the Airport” to me, but I remember being immediately struck by the premise: an author essentially hired as a “writer-in-residence” at Heathrow Airport, where he is free to wax philosophical (“at a specifically positioned desk in the departures hall between zones D and E”) about the deeper meanings behind air travel and its impact on human behavior. It appealed to me as a unique, eccentric, quick read ... and thanks to the talents of Alain de Botton, it turned into so much more than a review of an airport.
I couldn’t help but appreciate the musical, lyrical quality of de Botton’s prose, the way he was able to subtly extract multiple layers of meaning into something as common as an airplane’s wing. One of the marks of a good writer is to take banal subject matter and create an existential bent, and de Botton’s ability to mix in quite a bit of social commentary made “A Week at the Airport” quite surprisingly deep. Even as the project begins, de Botton admits to having reservations about how he can capture the vibrancy and dynamism of an airport accurately on the written page.
“ ... it was hard to dismiss a worry about what a modest and static thing a book would always be next to the chaotic, living entity that was a terminal.”
The clever de Botton gains momentum as the book progresses, to the point where he is creating evocative and emotional passages near the end that can move the reader to tears. His job gets easier when travelers begin to treat his desk as a “confessional” of sorts, baring their souls to him and leading him to comment that he was “struck by a sense of our race as a peculiar, combustible mixture of the beast and the angel.”
The book also featured a number of pictures throughout, which did a tremendous job of both breaking up the story and helping to tell the tale. The photography was beautiful, sublime and humorous at various times, making “A Week at the Airport” an excellent case study on how literature and photography can work hand in hand to complement one another.
In the end, de Botton paints the airport as the essential conduit for our hopes and dreams, a kind of in-between, purgatory-like place where we can balance what is possible vs. what is real. In the hands of such a brilliant writer, the airport becomes purely a backdrop, a secondary concept that only serves to give de Botton the opportunity to view it in the context of a symbol for grand statements on who we are and our essential person-ness.
“Nevertheless, in the end, there was something irremediably melancholic about the business of being reunited with one’s luggage. After hours in the air free of encumbrance, spurred on to formulate hopeful plans for the future by the views of coasts and forests below, passengers were reminded, on standing at the carousel, of all that was material and burdensome in existence.”
“Had one been asked to take a Martian to visit a single place that neatly captures the gamut of themes running through our civilisation -- from our faith in technology to our destruction of nature, from our interconnectedness to our romanticising of travel -- then it would have to be to the departures and arrivals halls that one would head.”
“It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us to recognise the important things that we are too defeated or too embittered to recognise from day to day.”
“At the beginning of human history, as we struggled to light fires and to chisel fallen trees into rudimentary canoes, who could have predicted that long after we had managed to send men to the moon and aeroplanes to Australasia, we would still have such trouble knowing how to tolerate ourselves, forgive our loved ones and apologise for our tantrums?”
He goes to great pains to paint us as needy, fragile creatures, from the divorced father being reunited with an estranged son to an anonymous custodian to a prostitute working out of the airport hotel. In one of his more heart-felt musings, de Botton describes the vulnerability that describes our desires to be greeted at the airport by someone -- anyone -- who cares.
“There is no one, however lonely or isolated, however pessimistic about the human race, however preoccupied with the payroll, who does not in the end expect that someone significant will come to say hello at arrivals.”
“We may spend the better part of our professional lives projecting strength and toughness, but we are all in the end creatures of appalling fragility and vulnerability.”
“Even if our loved ones have assured us that they will be busy at work, even if they told us they hated us for going travelling in the first place, even if they left us last June or died twelve and a half years ago, it is impossible not to experience a shiver of a sense that they may have come along anyway, just to surprise us and make us feel special (as someone must have done for us when we were small, only occasionally, or we would never have had the strength to make it this far).”
“Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few who hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognise by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.”
No subject is too difficult or out of bounds for de Botton, who tackles our technological enslavery, our tendency to set impossible expectations and our doomed emphasis on escapism. He also takes on the security mindset, customer service, religion, affluence, mortality, materialism, and even the interplay between celebrity and journalism.
He also lingers on the mystical quality of flying, which he argues will never be accepted as commonplace ... as it is essentially a death-defying act aimed toward reaching a destination where our life might be better.
“The lack of detail about the destinations served only to stir unfocused images of nostalgia and longing: Tel Aviv, Tripoli, St. Petersburg, Miami, Muscat via Abu Dhabi, Algiers, Grand Cayman via Nassau ... all of these promises of alternative lives, to which we might appeal at moments of claustrophobia and stagnation.”
“We have heard about too many ascensions, too many voices from heaven, too many airborne angels and saints to ever be able to regard the business of flight from an entirely pedestrian perspective, as we might, say, the act of travelling by train. Notions of the divine, the eternal and the significant accompany us covertly on to our craft, haunting the reading aloud of the safety instructions, the weather announcements made by our captains and, most importantly, our lofty views of the gentle curvature of the earth.”
“One wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpoising home with what one knows of alternative realities, as they exist in Tunis or Hyderabad. One wants never to forget that nothing here is normal, that the streets are different in Wiesbaden and Luoyang, that this is just one of many possible worlds.”
This fascinating book packs an unbelievably emotional wallop into just 107 pages -- an unmistakable gift for and from a writer charged with “just” detailing an airport.
“We forget everything: the books we read, the temples of Japan, the tombs of Luxor, the airline queues, our own foolishness. And so we gradually return to identifying happiness with elsewhere: twin rooms overlooking a harbour, a hilltop church boasting the remains of the Sicilian martyr St Agatha, a palm-fringed bungalow with complimentary evening buffet service. We recover an appetite for packing, hoping and screaming. We will need to go back and learn the important lessons of the airport all over again soon.”
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