A Week at the 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.

The notion of the journey as a harbinger of resolution was once an essential element of the religious pilgrimage, defined as an excursion through the outer world undertaken in an effort to promote and reinforce an inner evolution.

Then again, as we strain to remain civil under the unforgiving fluorescent lights, we may be reminded of one of the reasons we went travelling in the first place: to make sure that we would be better able to resist the mundane and angry moods in which daily life is so ready to embroil us.
The very brutality of the setting – the concrete floor marred with tyre marks and oil stains, the bays littered with abandoned trolleys and the ceilings echoing to the argumentative sounds of slamming doors and accelerating vehicles – encourages us to steel ourselves against a slide back into our worst possibilities. We may ask of our destinations, ‘Help me to feel more generous, less afraid, always curious. Put a gap between me and my confusion; the whole of the Atlantic between me and my shame.’ Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.

The prevalence of divorce in modern society guaranteed an unceasing supply of airport reunions between parents and children. In this context, there was no longer any point in pretending to be sober or stoic: it was time to squeeze a pair of frail and yet plump shoulders very tightly and founder into tears. 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. 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.

There is a painful contrast between the enormous objective projects that we set in train, at incalculable financial and environmental cost – the construction of terminals, of runways and of wide-bodied aircraft – and the subjective psychological knots that undermine their use. How quickly all the advantages of technological civilisation are wiped out by a domestic squabble. 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?