This short but satisfying book, which features (really pleasing) photographs by Richard Baker, is the story of de Botton’s week as “writer-in-residence” at Heathrow’s Terminal 5. He explores the airport and its environs, from the Sofitel hotel where he’s staying for the week to the office of the CEO of British Airways, and talks to people along the way, travelers and employees alike. I like how this book is about looking/noticing/listening, how the photographs are of details you might either never see as a traveler or might overlook: the steel roof supports of the terminal, the currency exchange desk, the guy shining shoes in one of the hallways, the restaurant attached to the first-class passengers’ lounge.
De Botton notes that the mere existence of a writer-in-residence at an airport encouraged others to pay more attention to the airport as place, rather than just moving through it: in addition to having the freedom to explore the airport, including the places off-limits to the public, de Botton had a desk set up for him in the departures area, where he would sit and write in public. As he puts it: “the writer’s desk was at heart an open invitation to users of the terminal to begin studying their setting with a bit more imagination and attention, to give weight to the feelings that airports provoke, but which we are seldom able to sort through or elaborate upon in the anxiety of making our way to the gate.” (44-45)
The other highlight of this book, for me, is de Botton’s style, the way that he highlights imagined or observed details. I love the images in this passage, imagining travel in the past and how it was different from travel by plane:
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. (92)
Or this one, about how aware of everything the traveler is after landing, even through the haze of jet lag:
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. (92)
PS: I love the fact that de Botton got to sit down in the middle of the runway late at night, after all the flights for the day had arrived or departed. He describes it as “a gesture that partook of some of the sublime thrill of touching a disconnected high-voltage electricity cable, running one’s fingers along the teeth of an anaesthetised shark or having a wash in a fallen dictator’s marble bathroom” (82).
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