What We Talk About When We Talk About Airports

- Robert Montgomery

Sometimes, when I need to head back home from Amsterdam to Leiden at night, I opt for the connection that has me wait over at Schiphol airport (which is en route) instead of at the Amsterdam train station. I get out of the train there and walk around the desolated halls of the airport. The glass edifices, the ubiquitous chain stores - Starbuckses and Burger Kings, - and overpriced souvenir shops, but most of all, the people. When you walk into an airport during the day, there is the bustle of life being made. People are moving swiftly in the fast lane, are taking their life into their hands. It is hard to imagine someone taking an airplane as not for a moment making some headway within their own infinitesimally confined destiny. Departing from an airport is the start of something, even if you are a businessman who does it on the daily. There is an inevitable sense of purpose.

At night, there is none of that. People saunter. I see a man spend at least a minute getting the change together to buy a sandwich. When do you ever see that during office hours? The man queued up behind him does not mind, nor does the clerk. There is no time here, now. There is never any time in airports. Maybe this is because they are always brightly lit; you have to peer past the glass facade to discern the time of day. Of course, there is departure time, but this is a notion seemingly abstracted from the sanitised hallways of the airport. It is just a number hanging in the air that cannot be properly wedded to the place. Is that, perhaps, because airports themselves are not grounded in a place? This is curious, because air travel is so concerned with space, with moving, with going somewhere and arriving somewhere else. But you wouldn't know this judging from the airports. They are void of local flavor, they are naught but places of transaction. You pay to come and go.

“Down by the tracks,” sings (ex!-claims!) mewithoutyou's Aaron Weiss in their song Carousels, “Watching trains go by to remind me there are places that aren't here.” This is the flip side of that paradox, the spacelessness of airports. In its own absence, it embellishes all the places that you normally would not think of as places. The terminal is an interim. It is purgatory.

Nowhere is the appeal of the airport more concentrated than in the television screens that hang in rows from the terminal ceilings to announce the departure and arrival of flights, whose absence of aesthetic self-consciousness and whose workmanlike casing and pedestrian typefaces do nothing to disguise their emotional charge and imaginative allure. Tokyo, Amsterdam, Istanbul; Warsaw, Seattle Rio… The constant calls of the screens, some accompanied by the impatient pulsing of a cursor, suggest with what ease our seemingly entrenched lives might be altered were we simply to walk down a corridor and onto a craft that in a few hours would land us in a place of which we had no memories and where no one know our name. How pleasant to hold in mind through the crevasses of our moods, at three in the afternoon… that there is always a plane taking off for somewhere, for Baudelaire’s ‘anywhere! anywhere!’: Trieste, Zurich, Paris.

- Alain de Botton, On Travel

Perhaps they are even more than purgatory: heaven itself. So brightly lit. The stewardesses as angels, the pilot as God? You put your life in their hands, but statistically speaking - and I think outside of the scare times directly following terrorist events most people do feel this way - air travel is an extremely ritualistic and structured thing. It usually unfolds exactly as planned. Every flight is virtually the same. Ritualistic in a religious way almost. Perhaps we have to get a little religious in order to fend off the idea that we are defying gravity. For Don DeLillo, always looking for what best defines the modern age, airports are safe havens; they are places in which your children can grow up.

Planes and terminals are the safest of places for the very young and very old. They are looked after, smiled upon, admired for their resourcefulness and pluck. People ask friendly questions, offer them blankets and sweets.

"Every child ought to have the opportunity to travel thousands of miles alone, " Tweedy said, "for the sake of her self-esteem and independence of mind, with clothes and toiletries of her own choosing. The sooner we get them in the air, the better. Like swimming or ice skating. You have to start them young. It's one of the things I'm proudest to have accomplished with Bee. I sent her to Boston on Eastern when she was nine. I told Granny Browner not to meet her plane. Getting out of airports is every bit as important as the actual flight. Too many parents ignore this phase of a child's development. Bee is thoroughly bicoastal now. She flew her first jumbo at ten, changed planes at O'Hare, had a near miss in Los Angeles. Two weeks later she took the Concorde to London. Malcolm was waiting with a split of champagne."

Barring mechanical failures, turbulent weather and terrorist acts, Tweedy said, an aircraft traveling at the speed of sound may be the last refuge of gracious living and civilized manners known to man.

- Don DeLillo, White Noise

Aerotropolis

Perhaps airports should be a warning for us. Their calculated, structured, trusted ways might spread across the lands. This is the future as envisioned by John Kasarda, as chronicled in Aerotropolis by Greg Lindsay. He wants the airport to morph into a city, thus an aerotropolis, which he defines as a “self-contained factory town with assembly lines literally ending in the bellies of waiting planes.” Kasarda calls our modern age the Instant Age, characterized by on-demand services and instant gratification of every desire, or as Umberto Eco and later Thomas de Zengotita had it, by “the moreness of everything.” The aerotropolis seems in a sense like a relic, a belated attempt to better recreate the connected online world in the flesh. Many companies have already created such aerotropoli, their warehouses spawning a small airport and a little town of workers. Will Self, in his review of Lindsay's book, noted that “at the core of Kasarda's conception of the aerotropolis lies the notion that space - unlike time - is fungible.” This peculiar quality of the airport to be of undefined space and time, to be interchangeable, is why the airport is the chosen poison of these architects of the new world. To recreate the Internet in the physical world is to want Instant Everything; everything, everywhere, all the time. This denies local flavor, the idea that places have their own unique footprint, their own pros and cons, have something to offer other than transportable products and experiences.

Will Self has made it a sport of his to walk to and fro airports. Like the surrealists and situationists before him, who recognised the subversive power of walking in the Age of the Automobile, Self similarly acknowledges this in the Age of the Aeroplane, where the debit of displacement is even higher. “I find it uncanny to be in a world in which, as I write this very sentence, I will travel thirty or forty miles through the upper atmosphere,” he writes in Psychogeography. Rebecca Solnit, in her history of walking, Wanderlust, once wrote of her suspicion that “the mind works at three miles an hour”. In fairness, if the future pans out as posited in Aerotropolis, this will cease to matter: every place will look and feel the same, so no mind calisthenics will be necessary to keep up. Will Self finds one such vision of the future in Dubai. After he takes a two-day walk from its airport towards the city center - Dubai, as you might imagine, being a city that sits rather well with Kasarda and Lindsay - he dismisses the duo's utopia once and for all:

My response to this Xanadu - powered by jet fuel and misted by the evaporation of desalinated water - was to stop flying altogether: I no longer wished to pick up any airmiles that contributed to such a future. Perhaps if frenetic flyers like Kasarda and Lindsay ever dared attempt a sustained hike through the wastelands of the postmodern ugliness they enthuse about, they might take a different view. After trekking through Dubai you don't have to be a Platonist to conclude that anything that aesthetically revolting must be not simply amoral, but bad.

Will Self, The Frowniest Spot on Earth

The airport, especially at night, is a pleasant void, where the cropped-up emotions and frustrations of your life will drain away with every plane that takes off. But it is only pleasant because these emotions and frustrations are there in the first place. We should not allow the airport to expand amorphously to cover everything. If we do, we will lose more than we've bargained for.

Hypnagogues

The instance before you fall asleep.

Have you ever considered this? The instance before you fall asleep? Perhaps, you are one of those lucky dullards who sink into oblivion the moment your left ear touches base, or maybe you sleep on your back, supine like Count Dracula in his coffin. But if you are like me, part of the tossers and turners, endlessly kicking the sheets, fluffing your pillow, sweating, getting out to drink water, kicking the sheets some more, you might have considered it. You might know how scary those moments are, how scary the silence is. Because that is the point: for most people, it is the only moment of silence during the whole day. We get up to the bustle of a day starting, schoolkids and commuters outside, people showering and having breakfast inside, the noise of the gears starting up. Then the rest of the day we are always, doing, something. Whether in the office or at home, there is at least radio and television to stop the gaps, should they occur. There is endless inane chatter to nullify the risks of being reminded of something altogether more primitive and closer to yourself. Yes, there still is something closer, there is an unnameable spirit that stirs inside of you of its own account, one not reduced to tears by a cathartic song or choking with laughter at punchlines; it is what throughout the longest part of history we used to call a soul.

That soul is what is troubling us tossers and turners in those silent moments. Even this problem can be alleviated of course: we can just keep the television on, “singing softly as you fall asleep,” or we can put on a record of “natural” sounds: waterfalls, chirping birds and the like. When we were young, there were adults who wanted to read to us, their responsible, reliable drone soundtracking our journey towards happy oblivion into the night. But perhaps instead of being “problem-solvers”, a much-trained skill in our times, we can appreciate the problem for what it is, a warning sign of some sorts. In a recent Intellegence Squared debate, Will Self argued against the motion We've never had it so good and concluded by urging us to “reject the motion and recover your soul.” What he was pointing out was that in the modern society, only that which can be quantified counts. We are used to on-demand, to instant coffee and instant happiness, while the soul needs to be nurtured over time and handled with kid gloves. Most troublingly, the soul does not come with a soul-o-meter, measuring – quantifying – what works and what doesn't. There is no science of the soul, thank God, which is why we as modern men like to ignore the thing. When a second ago I put the term “soul” to google, it gave me first soul music and then the soul as the quote-unquote immortal essence of a person. I don't know what that says about our society, but I doubt it's good.

Many religious as well as pagan societies celebrate the turning of the seasons. Many of these festivals, like the Mexican Day of the Dead, and the Celtic Samhain (which forms the roots of modern-day Halloween) celebrated and revered the dead, and importantly they considered the veil between the natural and supernatural worlds to be especially transparent on these days. Seances and rituals proliferate. Perhaps the moment after the day ends and before sleep has begun, is akin to this. Not that I am claiming anything supernatural, but, just as an analogy, perhaps we can say that the veil that has been spread between us and ourselves is especially thin at those times. We can finally hear our own thoughts, we can finally be honest with ourselves: “what is going on in my life?”

How often do you do this during the day? When I read a book I usually have a record playing in the background. If I don't, I can feel the silence intrude upon me. Reading is not an intrusive enough activity any more to suffice on its own. Similarly, I can listen to music and stare out of the window and still feel like I am doing nothing at all, even though I am listening to music and staring out of a window. But I can't do absolutely nothing. I cannot sit down in a chair in silence, close my eyes, and think. I cannot eat dinner without watching television or conversing with someone. It seems almost as if I cannot not multi-task anymore. It has become the default state.

Sometimes, finally in bed, there is just too much to process. Since this is the only chance your brain gets to be heard, it will damn sure take it.

I don't know if this is a modern ailment, or if it always was this way. I do think it is a modern thing to want too much – perhaps because we are aware of too much, perhaps because the world has expanded too far around us. We cannot allow ourselves the luxury of doing nothing anymore. But what we can do is take the necessary things and slow them down: walk where you wanted to drive or cycle, write a letter instead of an e-mail (instead of a text (instead of a personal message (instead of a tweet))). Better yet, just as a leisure activity, walk without knowing where you are going. Turn left on a whim, turn right on a whim, turn left again; your head might just clear up, you might be inspired in ways you had forgotten you could be inspired. You might just believe in the soul again, which – in case the word soul makes you uncomfortable – also comes down to saying this: you might just believe in unquantifiability, in uncertainty again. In the best-case scenario, you might just get lost.