p.12
If you learn nothing else from reading this essay, dear reader, learn this: Never have an operation on any part of your body without asking a plastic surgeon to come stand by in the operation room and keep an eye out. Because even if you are being operated on for something serious or potentially serous, even if you honestly believe tht your health is moreimportant than vanity, even if you wakr up in the hospital room thrilled beyond imagining that it wasn't cancer, even if you feel elated, grateful to be alive, full of blinding insight about what's important and what's not, even if you vow to be eternally joyful about being on the planet Earth and promise never to complain about anything ever again, I promist you that one day soon, sooner than you can imagine, you will look in the mirror and think, I hate this scar.
p.66
But the other day, on the street, I passed a homeless woman. I have never understood the feminists who insisted they were terrified of becoming bag ladies, but as I watched this woman shuffle down the street, I finally understood at least my version of it. I don't want to be melodramatic; I am never going to become a bag lady. but I am only about 8 hours a week away from looking exactly like that woman on the street -- with frizzled flyaway gray hair I would probably have if I stopped dyeing mine; with a potbelly I would definitely develop if I ate just half of what I think about eating every day; with the dirty nails and chapped lips and mustache and bushy eyebrows that would be my destiny if I ever spent two weeks on a desert island.
Eight hous a week and counting. By the time I reach my 70s, I'm sure it will take at least twice as long. The only consolation I have in any of this is that when I'm very old and virtually unemployable, I will at least have something to do. Assuming, of course, that I haven't spent all mymoney doing it.
p.107-8
Why hadn't I left at the first whiff of the other woman's perfume? Why hadn't I realized how much of what I thought of as love was simply my own highly developed gift for making lemondade? What failuer of imagination had caused me to forget that life was full of other possibilities, including the possibility that eventually I would fall in love again?
p.144
This week, I heard from Ed Levine again. he emailedto say that Andre's hungarian bakery had opened a branchin Manhattan, on 2nd Ave and 55th St. it was selling cabbage strudel over the counter.
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
A week at the airport -- Alain de Botton
p. 27
The wealthy tended to carry the least luggage, for their rank and itineraries led them to subscribe to the much-published axiom that one can now buy anything anywhere. But they had perhaps never visited a television retailer in Accra or they might have looked more favourably upon a Ghanaian faMily's decision to import a Samsung PS50, a high-definition plasma machine the weight and size of a laden coffin. It had been acquired the day before at a branch of Comet in Harlow and was eagerly awaited in the Kissehman quarter of Accra, where its existence would stan as evidence of the extraordinary status of its importer, a 38-y-o dispatch driver from Epping.
p.39
It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us to recognize the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognize from day to day.
p.43
Another man explained that he had been visiting his wife and children in London, but that he had a second family in LA who knew nothing about the first. he had five children in all and 2 mothers in law, yet his face bore none of the strains of his situation.
Each new day brought such a density of stories that my sense of time was stretched. it seemed like weeks, though it was in fact just a couple of days......
p.58
..but patient physical contact with thick bundles of notes offered a very different sort of immediacy: a living sense of the miscellany of the human species. These note, in every color and font, were decorated with images of strongmen, dictators, founding fathers, banana trees and leprechauns. Many were worn and creased from heavy use. They had helped to pay for camels in Yemen or saddles in peru, been stashed in the wallets of elderly barbers in Nepal or under the pillows of schoolboys in Moldova. A fraying fifty-kina note from Papua new Guinea (bird of paradise on the back, Prime Minister michael Somare on the front) hardly hinted at the sequence of transctions (from fruit to shoes, guns to toys) that had culminated in its arrival at Heathrow.
p.63-4 It seemed appropriate that I should bump into 2 clergymen just outside a perfume outlet... The older of the pair, .. wore a high-visibility jacet with the words "airport Priest"printed on the back.... "What do people tend to come to you to ask?" I enquired... There was a long pause, during which a disembodies voice reminded us once more never to leave our luggage unattended. ... "They come to me when they are lost," the Reverend replied at last, emphasizing the final word so that it seemed to reflect the spiritual confusion of mankind, a hapless race of beings described by St Augstine as "pilgrims in the City of Earth unti they can join the City of God." "Yes, but hwat might they be feeling lost about?" "Oh," said the Reverend with a sigh, "they are almost always looking for the toilets."
p.65 the advantages of wealth can sometimes be hard to see: expensive cars and wines, clothes and meals are nowadays rarely propotionately superior to their cheaper counterparts, due to the sophistication of modern processes of design and mass production. But in this sense, BA's Concorde Room was an anomaly. it was humblingly and thought-provokingly nicer than anywhere else I had ever seen at an airport, and perhaps in my life.
p.67-8
I started to feel sad about the fact that I might not be returning to the Concorder Room anytime soon. I relized, however, that the best way to attenuate my grief would be to nurture a thoroughgoing hatred of all those more regularly admitted into the premises.
In the rarefied air that was pumped into the Concorde Room, there nonetheless hovered a hint of something troubling:the implicit suggestion that the three traditional airline classes represented nothing less than a tripartite division of society accoring to people's genuine talents and virtues. Having abolished the caste eyetems of old and fought to ensure universal access to education and opportunity, it seemed that we might have built up a meritocracy that had introduced an eement of true justice into the distribution of wealth as well as of poverty. In the modern era, destitution could therefore be regarded as not merely pitiable but deserved. The question of why, if one was in any way talented or adept, one was still unable to earn admittance to an elegant lounge was a conundrum for all economy airline passengers to ponder in the privacy of their own minds as they perched on hard plastic chairs in the overcrowded and chaotic pulic waiting areas of the world's airports.
p.70 BA VIP lounge
after a copious lunch rounded off by a pieve of chocolate cake with passionfruit sorbet, an employee called Reggie described for me the complicated set of circumstances that had brought her to the brutally decorated staff area of the Concorde Room from a shantytown outside Puerto Princesa in the Phillipnes. Our preferene for the meritocratic versus the Christian belief system will in the end determine how we decide to interpret the relative standing of a tracksuited 27-y-o entrepreneur reading the Wall Street Journal by a stone-effect fireplace while waiting to board his flight to Seattle, against that of a Filipina cleaner whose job it is to tour the bathrooms of an airline's first-class lounge, swabbing the shower cubicles of their diverse and ever-changing colonies of international bacteria.
p.95
Upon disembarking, after a short walk, arriving passengers entered a hall that tried hard to downplay the full weight of its judicia role. There were no barriers, guns or reinforced booths, merely an illuminted sign overhead and a thin ine of granite running aross the floor. power was sure of itself here, confident enough to be restrained and in visible 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 ine 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 crossing available to visitors and residents of Great Britain alike.
p. 98-100
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 seomone 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 the hated us for going travelling in the first place, even if they left us last June or diesd twelve and half years ago, it is impossible not to experience a shiver of a sense that htey may have some 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 spaecs 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 cherful but equivocal look commonly worn by people listening out for pinchlines to jokes narrated by their bosses.
So what dignity must we possess not to show any hesitation when it comes clear, in the course of a 12-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 2 meters fmor us, a casually dressed young man perhaps emploed 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. ..
At arrivles, there were forms of welcome of which princes would have been jeaous, and which would have rendered inadequate the celebrations laid on at Venice;s quaysides for the explorers of the Easter silk routes. Individuals without official status or distinguishing traits, passengers who had sat unobtrusively for 22 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.
p.100-101
The prevalence of divroce 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 plum 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 recognize by their smell alone and whoem we would rather die than be without. There were men pacing impatiently and blakly 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 grey0green eyes and their mother's cheeks, emerging from behind the stainless-stel gate, holding the hand of an airport operative.
p.104-105
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 mundance 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 abandoes trolleys and the ceilings echoing to the argumentative shounds of slammin gdoors and accelerating vehicles - encourages us to steel ourselves against a slide back into our worst posibilities. 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 eimply where we wish to go.
The notion of the journey as a harbinger of resolution was once an esential 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 spritual 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--allsuch 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 out attempts to use journeys to make lasting changes in our lives.
p.107
Travellers would soon start to forget their journeys. They would be back in the office, where they would have to compress a continent into a few sentences. They would have their first arguments with spouses and children. they would look at an English landscape and think nothing of it. They would forget the cicadas and the hopes they had conceived together on their last day in the Peloponnese.
ut before long, they would start to grow curious once more about Dubrovnik and Prague, and regain their innocence with regard to the power of beaches and medieval streets. They would have fresh thoughts about renting a villa somewhere next year.
We forget everything: the books we read, the temples of Japan, the tombs of Luxor, the airine queues, our own foolishness. And so we gradually return to identifying happiness with elsewhere: twin rooms overlooking a harbor, a hilltop church boasting the remains of the Sicilian martyr St Agatha, a palm-fringed bungalow with complimentary evening buffet service. We recover an appetite for packing, hoping and screaming. We will need to go back and learn the important lessons of the airport all over again soon.
The wealthy tended to carry the least luggage, for their rank and itineraries led them to subscribe to the much-published axiom that one can now buy anything anywhere. But they had perhaps never visited a television retailer in Accra or they might have looked more favourably upon a Ghanaian faMily's decision to import a Samsung PS50, a high-definition plasma machine the weight and size of a laden coffin. It had been acquired the day before at a branch of Comet in Harlow and was eagerly awaited in the Kissehman quarter of Accra, where its existence would stan as evidence of the extraordinary status of its importer, a 38-y-o dispatch driver from Epping.
p.39
It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us to recognize the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognize from day to day.
p.43
Another man explained that he had been visiting his wife and children in London, but that he had a second family in LA who knew nothing about the first. he had five children in all and 2 mothers in law, yet his face bore none of the strains of his situation.
Each new day brought such a density of stories that my sense of time was stretched. it seemed like weeks, though it was in fact just a couple of days......
p.58
..but patient physical contact with thick bundles of notes offered a very different sort of immediacy: a living sense of the miscellany of the human species. These note, in every color and font, were decorated with images of strongmen, dictators, founding fathers, banana trees and leprechauns. Many were worn and creased from heavy use. They had helped to pay for camels in Yemen or saddles in peru, been stashed in the wallets of elderly barbers in Nepal or under the pillows of schoolboys in Moldova. A fraying fifty-kina note from Papua new Guinea (bird of paradise on the back, Prime Minister michael Somare on the front) hardly hinted at the sequence of transctions (from fruit to shoes, guns to toys) that had culminated in its arrival at Heathrow.
p.63-4 It seemed appropriate that I should bump into 2 clergymen just outside a perfume outlet... The older of the pair, .. wore a high-visibility jacet with the words "airport Priest"printed on the back.... "What do people tend to come to you to ask?" I enquired... There was a long pause, during which a disembodies voice reminded us once more never to leave our luggage unattended. ... "They come to me when they are lost," the Reverend replied at last, emphasizing the final word so that it seemed to reflect the spiritual confusion of mankind, a hapless race of beings described by St Augstine as "pilgrims in the City of Earth unti they can join the City of God." "Yes, but hwat might they be feeling lost about?" "Oh," said the Reverend with a sigh, "they are almost always looking for the toilets."
p.65 the advantages of wealth can sometimes be hard to see: expensive cars and wines, clothes and meals are nowadays rarely propotionately superior to their cheaper counterparts, due to the sophistication of modern processes of design and mass production. But in this sense, BA's Concorde Room was an anomaly. it was humblingly and thought-provokingly nicer than anywhere else I had ever seen at an airport, and perhaps in my life.
p.67-8
I started to feel sad about the fact that I might not be returning to the Concorder Room anytime soon. I relized, however, that the best way to attenuate my grief would be to nurture a thoroughgoing hatred of all those more regularly admitted into the premises.
In the rarefied air that was pumped into the Concorde Room, there nonetheless hovered a hint of something troubling:the implicit suggestion that the three traditional airline classes represented nothing less than a tripartite division of society accoring to people's genuine talents and virtues. Having abolished the caste eyetems of old and fought to ensure universal access to education and opportunity, it seemed that we might have built up a meritocracy that had introduced an eement of true justice into the distribution of wealth as well as of poverty. In the modern era, destitution could therefore be regarded as not merely pitiable but deserved. The question of why, if one was in any way talented or adept, one was still unable to earn admittance to an elegant lounge was a conundrum for all economy airline passengers to ponder in the privacy of their own minds as they perched on hard plastic chairs in the overcrowded and chaotic pulic waiting areas of the world's airports.
p.70 BA VIP lounge
after a copious lunch rounded off by a pieve of chocolate cake with passionfruit sorbet, an employee called Reggie described for me the complicated set of circumstances that had brought her to the brutally decorated staff area of the Concorde Room from a shantytown outside Puerto Princesa in the Phillipnes. Our preferene for the meritocratic versus the Christian belief system will in the end determine how we decide to interpret the relative standing of a tracksuited 27-y-o entrepreneur reading the Wall Street Journal by a stone-effect fireplace while waiting to board his flight to Seattle, against that of a Filipina cleaner whose job it is to tour the bathrooms of an airline's first-class lounge, swabbing the shower cubicles of their diverse and ever-changing colonies of international bacteria.
p.95
Upon disembarking, after a short walk, arriving passengers entered a hall that tried hard to downplay the full weight of its judicia role. There were no barriers, guns or reinforced booths, merely an illuminted sign overhead and a thin ine of granite running aross the floor. power was sure of itself here, confident enough to be restrained and in visible 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 ine 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 crossing available to visitors and residents of Great Britain alike.
p. 98-100
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 seomone 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 the hated us for going travelling in the first place, even if they left us last June or diesd twelve and half years ago, it is impossible not to experience a shiver of a sense that htey may have some 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 spaecs 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 cherful but equivocal look commonly worn by people listening out for pinchlines to jokes narrated by their bosses.
So what dignity must we possess not to show any hesitation when it comes clear, in the course of a 12-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 2 meters fmor us, a casually dressed young man perhaps emploed 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. ..
At arrivles, there were forms of welcome of which princes would have been jeaous, and which would have rendered inadequate the celebrations laid on at Venice;s quaysides for the explorers of the Easter silk routes. Individuals without official status or distinguishing traits, passengers who had sat unobtrusively for 22 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.
p.100-101
The prevalence of divroce 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 plum 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 recognize by their smell alone and whoem we would rather die than be without. There were men pacing impatiently and blakly 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 grey0green eyes and their mother's cheeks, emerging from behind the stainless-stel gate, holding the hand of an airport operative.
p.104-105
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 mundance 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 abandoes trolleys and the ceilings echoing to the argumentative shounds of slammin gdoors and accelerating vehicles - encourages us to steel ourselves against a slide back into our worst posibilities. 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 eimply where we wish to go.
The notion of the journey as a harbinger of resolution was once an esential 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 spritual 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--allsuch 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 out attempts to use journeys to make lasting changes in our lives.
p.107
Travellers would soon start to forget their journeys. They would be back in the office, where they would have to compress a continent into a few sentences. They would have their first arguments with spouses and children. they would look at an English landscape and think nothing of it. They would forget the cicadas and the hopes they had conceived together on their last day in the Peloponnese.
ut before long, they would start to grow curious once more about Dubrovnik and Prague, and regain their innocence with regard to the power of beaches and medieval streets. They would have fresh thoughts about renting a villa somewhere next year.
We forget everything: the books we read, the temples of Japan, the tombs of Luxor, the airine queues, our own foolishness. And so we gradually return to identifying happiness with elsewhere: twin rooms overlooking a harbor, a hilltop church boasting the remains of the Sicilian martyr St Agatha, a palm-fringed bungalow with complimentary evening buffet service. We recover an appetite for packing, hoping and screaming. We will need to go back and learn the important lessons of the airport all over again soon.
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