In a few weeks, I’ll be leaving Scotland to avoid the bitterest part of its winter, and taking the train down to London where I’ll be leaping on a plane that’s bound for Costa Rica.
Of course, that’s not exactly true. I’m not going to throw myself through the door of a plane as it passes – I’ll have to traverse one of those vast, strange cathedral-like places we call airports, filled with huge and often impressive architecture that nobody gets to enjoy because they’re in too much of a hurry, utterly thronged with humanity but oddly empty-feeling because nobody actually lives there.
I’ll be using Terminal 5 at London’s Heathrow – and if you were traversing it in the summer of 2009, you may have seen a writerly-looking chap looking not entire unlike myself, sat tapping on a computer with his words being displayed on a large plasma screen over his head. This was the temporary Writer In Residence, Alain de Botton, and he was writing a book about what airports really are.
This is the book he wrote of the week-long experience – and it’s a weird & beautiful thing that I can’t recommend to you enough. In the words of the back cover:
“In the summer of 2009…Alain de Botton was given unprecedented, unrestricted access to wander around Heathrow, one of the world’s biggest airports, having been appointed its Writer-in-Residence. He spoke with everyone from airline staff and senior executives to travellers passing through, and based on these conversations he produced this extraordinary account of life at an airport and what it says about modern existence.
Working with the renowned documentary photographer Richard Baker, he explores the magical and the mundane, and the stories that inhabit this strange ‘non-place’ that we are usually eager to leave. Taking the reader through the departures lounge, ‘airside’ and the arrivals hall, de Botton shows with his usual combination of wit and wisdom that spending time in an airport can be more useful and more revealing than we might think.”
It’s such a rare perspective, because – when was the last time you willingly lingered in an airport? Or a shopping mall? Or a high-rise car park?
The obvious question is “uh – why would you do that, now?” Now, isn’t that an interesting word to use here – “obvious”? The portcullis of our mind has slammed down, well oiled by cultural norms, postmodern fashions and bitter experience. We’ve all had dreadful stays in such places. They’re urban deserts, traversed as quickly as your body will allow, and to linger is to actively invite suffering. In the case of airports, there’s the added pressure of a ticking clock. Everything tells you to hurry along and nothing tells you to soak it all in.
Consequently, our minds render them noisy, lonely and weirdly inhuman. Upper lip curling, we write them off with a flourish.
I’m fascinated by that – the same way I’m fascinated by certain towns that gain a reputation for awfulness that’s reinforced by people who have never been to them. There’s a sleight of hand here. Something is being hidden.
In an interview with travel writing magazine World Hum, de Botton gave a clue: for starters, we’ve lost the ability to arrive. We reach destinations far too quickly and in too much of an overwhelmed state, and so we under-appreciate them as rewards for our efforts, and as places in their own right. They’re merely “on the way” somewhere. When we spend time in them it’s an unwanted event, foisted on us by collapsed schedules, missed connections and stroppy weather – and that makes them undesirable as a destination in themselves.
But beyond that, just how offensive is the average airport? My sole transit of Munich Airport to date was long enough to see that it’s a technical marvel – and protracted bouts of sweaty, semi-chaotic queueing at other airports convinced me of the exact opposite. Some inspire curiosity, others weariness (maybe through no fault of their designers) – and all are different. So why do they generally get labeled “bad”?
Perhaps it’s that these places aren’t themselves what is dreadful – it’s our relationship to them. Maybe it’s like this: all the places we occupy in the world are human inventions (in reality, everywhere is a connected part of the same thing, however much we like dividing them up in all sorts of ways).
Then we pin labels to the places we spent time in – but some places, for obscure and complicated reasons, get values attached to them as well. They’re no longer interesting and worthy of our curiosity – they come pre-judged in a way that makes them either worth exploring or not. Airports? Soulless and horrible. Pubs? Cozy and charming! And so on.
Yet we’ve laden them on all the baggage we brought with us at the time (pub = beer + friends = happiness; airport = remainder of food poisoning from that dodgy kebab + jet lag + ticking clock = abominable).
Could that change? Couldn’t airports be like pubs if we looked at them a different way, like a writer employed to look past his own snap judgements and try to see what’s really there?
So, the next time you pass through a shopping mall or a hotel lobby or a bus station – try taking your current discomfort and perhaps your mood out of the equation, if you can, and see what’s left. At the very least – isn’t it simply amazing that other human beings just like you, built this thing?
In the meantime, I’ll be over here, reading a good book about airports.