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By Root 2284 0

their seats subtly reeking of midprice perfumes and aftershaves, and usually proceed to look straight ahead of them without speaking a word to one another until the aircraft lands, or they open up their laptop computers to bury themselves in their work, or they open their artless books that are usually volumes advertised as being beneficial to their moral or psychological well-being, and if they chance to fall into conversation with their fellow passengers, they can only converse on harmless subjects such as golf or real estate. They are people who would rather pursue happiness than joy. That’s what I really detest about air travel. It’s not my fear of flying that prevents me from it; it’s my fear of the middle class. I can only tolerate the company of either the underclasses, or the aristocracy.”

Leon paused, held his breath and shifted his weight to ease the passage of a fart. He continued:

“So remember, Bruno: should you ever need to travel any great distance, you must always if possible take a train or a bus, any mode of transport but an airplane. That hideous invisible gas that permeates our civilization is at its thickest and most dangerous level of concentration inside the sealed cabin of a passenger airplane. But here? Look around! What do we see? We see all manner of people too low-class to fathom the idea of purchasing an airplane ticket. We see recent immigrants from distant impoverished lands, nattering amongst themselves in their exotic tongues, as well as a healthy sampling of drunks, perverts, rednecks, gangbangers, and drug addicts. We see people who are frighteningly thin as well as those who are frighteningly fat. We see people who belong to atavistically folksy religious sects that require them to dress for the early nineteenth century and speak in long-forgotten dialects. I prefer the company of these people, Bruno. In here, one can barely smell that poisonous gas—it is too well masked by the comingling odors of microwaved hot dogs, flatulence, and feet.”

The idea of flying (I have only been on an airplane once in my life, and under unpleasant circumstances that I have already related in this narrative) does not repulse me for safety reasons (which I would have to admit irrational), nor for Leon’s more subtle and difficult sociological reasons, and not only because there is nothing in my evolutionary pedigree (nor is there, for that matter, in yours) that could prepare me for the unnerving bodily discombobulation of the experience; rather, the idea of flying repulses me philosophically and psychogeographically. I have heard and I believe that a child in an airplane during takeoff may often be overheard to remark that the things he sees below through the window look like “toys.” That’s just it! Observing the earth from such a godlike perspective destroys an animal’s reverence for its geography. They’re not “toys,” kid. All that land you’re zipping over at forty thousand feet and five hundred miles per hour? Down there is a multitude of worlds that you will never know of. People may come to forget them, because they no longer care about them. So go ahead and let them die. Let the earth die, let all the animals die. You probably wouldn’t be interested in them anyway. All people care about is getting from one human environment to another as quickly as they can, wasting the minimum possible time in the places between the places. The human imagination yearns to connect point A to point B not with a line, but simply by folding space until the points touch—to entirely eliminate the space between them. This is why, in some science fiction films, people in the future may travel from place to place by teleportation. That is the ultimate realization of humanity’s quest to devise faster and more efficient ways of getting from one place to another: to simply eliminate the liminal spaces entirely. And then people will finally become what they have always sought to be: an animal who moves exclusively in environments of its own design, an animal that is all mind, an animal who has no use for its body, an animal who