Book: Changing Planes
Quotes of Book: Changing Planes
I am not sure who I am," I said cautiously."Many people never are," she said. "But it doesn't matter, you know. If for one moment of your whole life you know that you are, then that's your life, that moment, that's unnua, that's all. In a short life I saw my mother's face, like the sun. So I'm here. In a long life I went there and there and there; but I dug in the garden, the root of a weed came up in my hand, so I am unnua. When you get old, you know, you keep being here instead of there, everything is here. Everything is here," she repeated. book-quoteIf both you and your plane are on time, the airport is merely a diffuse, short, miserable prelude to the intense, long, miserable plane trip. But what if there's five hours between your arrival and your connecting flight, or your plane is late arriving and you've missed your connection, or the connecting flight is late, or the staff of another airline are striking for a wage-benefit package and the government has not yet ordered out the National Guard to control this threat to international capitalism so your airline staff is trying to handle twice as many people as usual, or there are tornadoes or thunderstorms or blizzards or little important bits of the plane missing or any of the thousand other reasons {never under any circumstances the fault of the airlines, and rarely explained at the time} why those who go places on airplanes sit and sit and sit and sit in airports, not going anywhere?In this, probably its true aspect, the airport is not a prelude to travel, not a place of transition: it is a stop. A blockage. A constipation. The airport is where you can't go anywhere else. A nonplace in which time does not pass and there is no hope of any meaningful existence. A terminus: the end. The airport offers nothing to any human being except access to the interval between planes. book-quote
