Iqra’i

_{I know it’s bad form to overrule the declarations of one’s blogmates, but I, at least, have no intention of taking the rest of the week off. (Not least because I need to justify borrowing Nicola’s laptop for the trip.)}

Let me tell you, folks, it is a great day to fly American Airlines.

Luckily, I’m not flying to Madison in an MD-80, so my flight’s all right. But it’s always fun to be tangent to a news story. The discrepancy between the huge crowds at the check-in desk and the empty waiting areas by the gates finds a ready explanation; you get to explain to the passenger sitting next to you why his journey from Sao Paolo to Raleigh has unexpectedly dropped him off in New York; when a mispressed button causes the intercom to announce “Oh no she didn’t…that’s not what I told her at all,” passengers chuckle to each other to “give them a break, it’s been a rough day.”

The sought camaraderie of airport terminals is more noticeable than in most public places full of solitary strangers, maybe because it’s not really a familiar environment to anyone involved. (And it seems to me that the more regularly someone flies, the less likely he is to strike up a conversation with the person facing him in the waiting area.) Everybody has his own reason for flying, and it’s usually important that she be on this particular flight — so the flight is a conduit for dozens of particular narratives. In the air, the cohabitation of these narratives gets oppressive: with neither elbow room nor escape route you can’t keep other people’s lives from bleeding into your own (unwanted small talk, unruly toddlers). But a terminal isn’t so claustrophobic: the fact that a passenger can walk away makes the fact that he doesn’t that much more meaningful, of course.

Travel crises do a lot to bring this out, in a we’re-all-in-this-together sort of way. But at the same time, any obstacle or antagonism reinforces each passenger’s belief in the importance of his own narrative. Personal significance, professional significance, plain old urgency: all of these are invoked with an air of ruffled indignation and the conclusion that “This can’t be happening to me.” But arguing one’s way through the security line means putting one’s own narrative ahead of other passengers’, quite literally, and I’m uncomfortable with that.

Nicola read me a Chesterton quote last night that, sadly, I can’t find online, about how liberating it is for men who live by (and for) rules to feel that they are fighting in anarchy, antagonized as the dandelion fights against the world. I appreciate the romance but think this sad puffed self-importance of air travel may be the flip side of the coin.