A Week at the Airport

by Alain De Botton

  I returned to my room at three in the morning, struck by a sense of our race as a peculiar, combustible mixture of the beast and the angel. The first plane, due at Heathrow at dawn, was now somewhere over western Russia.

  1 There used to be time to arrive. Incremental geographical changes would ease the inner transitions: desert would gradually give way to shrub, savannah to grassland. At the harbour, the camels would be unloaded, a room would be found overlooking the customs house, passage would be negotiated on a steamer. Flying fish would skim past the ship’s hull. The crew would play cards. The air would cool.

  Now a traveller may be in Abuja on Tuesday and at the end of a satellite in the new terminal at Heathrow on Wednesday. Yesterday lunchtime, one had fried plantain in the Wuse District to the sound of an African cuckoo, whereas at eight this morning the captain is closing down the 777’s twin engines at a gate next to a branch of Costa Coffee.

  Despite one’s exhaustion, one’s senses are fully awake, registering everything – the light, the signage, the floor polish, the skin tones, the metallic sounds, the advertisements – as sharply as if one were on drugs, or a newborn baby, or Tolstoy. Home all at once seems the strangest of destinations, its every detail relativised by the other lands one has visited. How peculiar this morning light looks against the memory of dawn in the Obudu hills, how unusual the recorded announcements sound after the wind in the High Atlas and how inexplicably English (in a way they will never know) the chat of the two female ground staff seems when one has the din of a street market in Lusaka still in one’s ears.

  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.

  2 In the brief history of aviation, not many airports have managed to fulfil their visitors’ hopes for an architecture that might properly honour the act of arrival. Too few have followed the example set by Jerusalem’s elaborate Jaffa Gate, which once welcomed travellers who had completed the journey to the Holy City across the baked Shephelah plains and through the thief-infested Judean hills. But Terminal 5 wanted to have a go.

  In the older terminals at Heathrow, it was a certain sort of carpet that one tended to notice first, swirling green, yellow, brown and orange, around which there hovered associations of vomit, pubs and hospitals. Here, by way of contrast, there were handsome grey composite tiles, bright corridors lined with glass panels in a calming celadon shade and bathrooms fitted out with gracious sanitary ware and full-length cubicle doors made of heavy timber.

  The structure was proposing a new idea of Britain, a country that would be reconciled to technology, that would no longer be in thrall to its past, that would be democratic, tolerant, intelligent, playful and lacking in spite or irony. All this was a simplification, of course: twenty kilometres to the west and north were tidy hamlets and run-down estates that would at once have contravened any of the suggestions encoded in the terminal’s walls and ceilings.

  Nevertheless, like Geoffrey Bawa’s Parliament in Colombo or Jørn Utzon’s Opera House in Sydney, Richard Rogers’s Terminal 5 was applying the prerogative of all ambitious architecture to create rather than merely reflect an identity. It hoped to use the hour or so when passengers were within its space – objectively, to have their passports stamped and to recover their luggage – to define what the United Kingdom might one day become, rather than what it too often is.

  3 Upon disembarking, after a short walk, arriving passengers entered a hall that tried hard to downplay the full weight of its judicial role. There were no barriers, guns or reinforced booths, merely an illuminated sign overhead and a thin line of granite running across the floor. Power was sure of itself here, confident enough to be restrained and invisible to those privileged, by an accident of birth, to skirt it. Three times a day, a cleaning team came and swept their brooms across the line that marked the divide between the no man’s land of the aircraft on the one side and, on the other, the well-stocked pharmacies, benign mosquitoes, generous library lending policies, sewage plants and pelican crossings available to visitors and residents of Great Britain alike.

  With just a single unhappy swipe of the computer, however, all such implicit promises might be prematurely broken. A guard would be called and would lead the unfortunate traveller from the immigration hall to a suite of rooms two storeys below. The children’s playroom seemed especially poignant in its fittings: there was a Brio train, most of the Lego City range, a box of Caran d’Ache pens and, for each new child sequestered there, a box of snacks and plastic animals, his or hers to keep. In the imaginations of certain children in Eritrea or Somalia, England would hence always remain a briefly glimpsed country of Quavers, Jelly Tots and squared cartons of orange juice – a country so rich it could afford to give away small digital alarm clocks, and one whose guards knew how to put wooden train tracks together. Next door, in a barer room in which every word was being captured by a police tape recorder, their parents would experience another side of the nation, as they delineated their unsuccessful applications to an impassive member of the immigration service.

  4 Over the course of history, few joyful moments can have unfolded in a baggage-reclaim area, though the one in the terminal was certainly doing its best to keep its users optimistic.

  It had high ceilings, flawlessly poured concrete walls and trolleys in abundance. Furthermore, the bags came quite quickly. The company responsible for the conveyor belts, Vanderlande Industries from the Netherlands, had made its reputation in the mail-order and parcel-distribution sectors and was now the world leader in suitcase logistics. Seventeen kilometres’ worth of conveyor belts ran under the terminal, where they were capable of processing some twelve thousand pieces of luggage an hour. One hundred and forty computers scanned tags, determined where individual bags were going and checked them for explosives along the way. The machines treated the suitcases with a level of care that few humans would have shown them: when the bags had to wait in transit, robots would carry them gently over to a dormitory and lay them down on yellow mattresses, where – like their owners in the lounges above – they would loll until their flights were ready to receive them. By the time they were lifted off the belt, many suitcases were likely to have had more interesting travels than their owners.

  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. There were some elemental dualities at work in the contrasting realms of the baggage-reclaim hall and the aeroplane – dichotomies of matter and spirit, heaviness and lightness, body and soul – with the negative halves of the equations all linked to the stream of almost identical black Samsonite cases that rolled ceaselessly along the tunnels and belts of Vanderlande’s exquisite conveyor apparatus.

  Around the carousel, as in a Roman traffic jam, trolleys grimly refused to cede so much as a centimetre to one another. Although each suitcase was a repository of dense and likely fascinating individuality – this one perhaps containing a lime-coloured bikini and an unread copy of Civilization and Its Discontents, that one a dressing gown stolen from a Chicago hotel and a packet of Roche antidepressants – this was not the place to start thinking about anyone else.

  5 Yet the baggage area was only a prelude to the airport’s emotional climax. 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.

  Even if our loved ones have assured us that they will be busy at work, even if they told us they hated us for go
ing 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, if only occasionally, or we would never have had the strength to make it this far).

  It is therefore hard to know just what expression we should mould our faces into as we advance towards the reception zone. It might be foolhardy to relinquish the solemn and guarded demeneaour we usually adopt while wandering through the anonymous spaces of the world, but at the same time, it seems only right that we should leave open at least the suggestion of a smile. We may settle on the sort of cheerful but equivocal look commonly worn by people listening out for punchlines to jokes narrated by their bosses.

  So what dignity must we possess not to show any hesitation when it becomes clear, in the course of a twelve-second scan of the line, that we are indeed alone on the planet, with nowhere to head to other than a long queue at the ticket machine for the Heathrow Express. What maturity not to mind that only two metres from us, a casually dressed young man perhaps employed in the lifeguard industry has been met with a paroxysm of joy by a sincere and thoughtful-looking young woman with whose mouth he is now involved. And what a commitment to reality it will take for us not to wish that we might, just for a time, be not our own tiresome selves but rather Gavin, flying in from Los Angeles after a gap year in Fiji and Australia, with whose devoted parents, exhilarated aunt, delighted sister, two girl friends and a helium balloon we might therefore repair to a house on the southern outskirts of Birmingham.

  At arrivals, there were forms of welcome of which princes would have been jealous, and which would have rendered inadequate the celebrations laid on at Venice’s quaysides for the explorers of the Eastern silk routes. Individuals without official status or distinguishing traits, passengers who had sat unobtrusively for twenty-two hours near the emergency exits, now set aside their bashfulness and revealed themselves as the intended targets of flags, banners, streamers and irregularly formed home-baked chocolate biscuits – while, behind them, the chiefs of large corporations prepared for glacial limousine rides to the marble-and-orchid-bedecked lobbies of their luxury hotels.

  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 were men pacing impatiently and blankly who had looked forward to this moment for half a year and could not restrain themselves any further at the sight of a small boy endowed with their own grey-green eyes and their mother’s cheeks, emerging from behind the stainless-steel gate, holding the hand of an airport operative.

  At such moments, it felt almost as if death itself had been averted – and yet there was also a sense, lending the occasion more poignancy still, that it could not go on being cheated for ever. Perhaps this was a way of practising for mortality. Some day, many years from now, the adult child would say goodbye to his father before going on a routine business trip, and the reprieve would abruptly run out. There would be a telephone call in the middle of the night to a room on the twentieth floor of a Melbourne hotel, bringing the news that the parent had suffered a catastrophic seizure on the other side of the world and that there was nothing more the doctors could do for him – and from that day forward, for the now-grown-up boy, the line in arrivals would always be missing one face in particular.

  6 Not all meetings were so emotional. One might have come from Shanghai to join Malcolm and Mike for a drive down to Bournemouth to learn English for the summer: a two-month sojourn in a bed and breakfast near the pier, with regular lessons from a tutor who would teach her class how to say ‘ought’ and help them master business English, a subcategory of the language that would vouchsafe future careers in the semi-conductor and textile industries of the Pearl River delta.

  For his part, Mohammed was waiting for Chris’s flight from San Francisco. The former, originally from Lahore, was at present based in Southall, while the latter, from Portland, Oregon, now lived in Silicon Valley – not that either man would attempt to discover these details about the other. In an otherwise uninhabited universe, how strange that one should so easily be able to sit in silence with another human being in a black Mercedes S-Class sedan. For both driver and passenger, the trip would be counted a success if the other party proved not to be a murderer or a thief. The hour and a half of stillness would be punctuated only by the occasional electronic command to turn left or right at the next junction, until the Mercedes reached a glass-fronted office building in Canary Wharf, where Chris was due to attend a meeting on the storage of financial data and Mohammed returned to the terminal to begin another journey, this time to Kent, with the no less mysterious or more talkative Mr K from Narita.

  7 Many of the more conventional reunions seemed to beg the question of how their levels of excitement could be kept up. Maya had been waiting for this moment for the previous twelve hours. She had had butterflies since her plane crossed the coast of Ireland. At 9,000 metres up, she had anticipated Gianfranco’s touch. But finally, after eight minutes of a sustained embrace, the couple had no alternative: it was time for them to go and find his car.

  It seems curious but in the end appropriate that life should often put in our way, so near to the site of some of our most intense and heartfelt encounters, one of the greatest obstacles known to relationships: the requirement to pay for and then negotiate a way out of a multi-storey car park.

  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 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. Christian theorists were not in the least troubled by the dangers, discomforts or expense posed by pilgrimages, for they regarded these and other apparent disadvantages as mechanisms whereby the underlying spiritual intent of the trip could be rendered more vivid. Snowbound passes in the Alps, storms off the coast of Italy, brigands in Malta, corrupt Ottoman guards – all such trials merely helped to ensure that a trip would not be easily forgotten.

  Whatever the benefits of prolific and convenient air travel, we may curse it for its smooth subversion of our attempts to use journeys to make lasting changes in our lives.

  8 It was time to start packing up. In the connecting corridor leading to the Sofitel, I was intercepted by a fellow employee of the airport who was conducting a survey of newly arrived passengers, gathering their impressions of the terminal, from the signage to the lighting, the eating to the passport stamping. The responses were
calibrated on a scale of 0 to 5, and the results would be tabulated as part of an internal review commissioned by the chief executive of Heathrow. I questioned the unusually protracted nature of this interview only in so far as it made me think of how seldom market researchers, with access to influential authorities, ask us to reflect on any of the more troubling issues we face in life more generally. On a scale of 0 to 5, how are we enjoying our marriages? Feeling about our careers? Dealing with the idea of one day dying?

  I ordered my last commercially sponsored club sandwich in the hotel lounge. The planes were particularly loud as they passed overhead – so loud that as one MEA Airbus took off for Beirut, the waiter shouted, ‘God help us!’ in a way that startled me and my sole fellow diner, a businessman from Bangladesh en route to Canada.

  I worried that I might never have another reason to leave the house. I felt how hard it is for writers to look beyond domestic experience. I dreamt of other possible residencies in institutions central to modern life – banks, nuclear power stations, governments, old people’s homes – and of a kind of writing that could report on the world while still remaining irresponsible, subjective and a bit peculiar.

  9 Just as passengers were concluding their journeys in the arrivals hall, above them, in departures, others were preparing to set off anew. BA138 from Mumbai was turning into BA295 to Chicago. Members of the crew were dispersing: the captain was driving to Hampshire, the chief purser was on a train to Bristol and the steward who had looked after the upper deck was already out of uniform (and humbled thereby, like a soldier without his regimental kit) and headed for a flat in Reading.