A Week at the Airport - Alain De Botton [5]
Cargo handlers opened the holds to unload crates filled with the chilled flanks of Argentine cattle and the crenellated forms of crustaceans that had, just the day before, been marching heedlessly across Nantucket Sound. In only a few hours, the plane would be sent up into the sky once more. Fuel hoses were attached to its wings and the tanks replenished with Jet A-1 that would steadily be burned over the African savannah. In the already vacant front cabins, where it might cost the equivalent of a small car to spend the night reclining in an armchair, cleaners scrambled to pick up the financial weeklies, half-eaten chocolates and distorted foam earplugs left behind by the flight’s complement of plutocrats and actors. Passengers disembarked for whom this ordinary English morning would have a supernatural tinge.
4 Meanwhile, at the drop-off point in front of the terminal, cars were pulling up in increasing numbers, rusty minicabs with tensely negotiated fares alongside muscular limousines from whose armoured doors men emerged crossly and swiftly into the executive channels.
Some of the trips starting here had been decided upon only in the previous few days, booked in response to a swiftly developing situation in the Munich or Milan office; others were the fruit of three years’ painful anticipation of a return to a village in northern Kashmir, with six dark-green suitcases filled with gifts for young relatives never previously met.
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 stand as evidence of the extraordinary status of its importer, a thirty-eight-year-old dispatch driver from Epping.
Entry into the vast space of the departures hall heralded the opportunity, characteristic in the transport nodes of the modern world, to observe people with discretion, to forget oneself in a sea of otherness and to let the imagination loose on the limitless supply of fragmentary stories provided by the eye and ear. The mighty steel bracing of the airport’s ceiling recalled the scaffolding of the great nineteenth-century railway stations, and evoked the sense of awe – suggested in paintings such as Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare – that must have been experienced by the first crowds to step inside these light-filled, iron-limbed halls pullulating with strangers, buildings that enabled a person to sense viscerally, rather than just grasp intellectually, the vastness and diversity of humanity.
The roof of the building weighed 18,000 tonnes, but the steel columns supporting it hardly suggested the pressures they were under. They were endowed with a subcategory of beauty we might refer to as elegance, present whenever architecture has the modesty not to draw attention to the difficulties it has surmounted. On top of their tapered necks, the columns balanced the 400-metre roof as if they were holding up a canopy made of linen, offering a metaphor for how we too might like to stand in relation to our burdens.
Most passengers were bound for a bank of automatic check-in machines in the centre of the hall. These represented an epochal shift away from the human hand and towards the robot, a transition as significant in the context of airline logistics as that