The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [78]
Only when I got nearer to them did I apprehend that each of the planes had suffered a particular injury. Several were missing their noses; others had their intakes and sensor probes wrapped in silver foil; a few had lost their undercarriages and were being held up off the ground by packing crates. An Air India 737 had been sliced in half and dug into the sand, so that its cockpit pointed up towards the sky, with no sign of its rear fuselage.
The aircraft were cordoned off by a barbed-wire fence, to one side of which was a rudimentary single-storey administrative building. Hoping to secure permission to take a closer look, I pushed open a corrugated steel door and found myself in the middle of an office. The occupant was squatting beneath his desk, dealing with a printer problem which had sunk him into the sort of cataclysmically sour mood that typically accompanies such a predicament. ‘No,’ he shouted at me, without even raising his head. I explained that I had been driving by the airfield and had been captivated by the peculiar and desolate beauty of the gigantic machines which lay abandoned, and slowly decomposing, in the desert.
‘Fuck off, we don’t give tours,’ he responded decisively.
Certain that his logic would benefit from being exposed to the deeper wellspring of my curiosity, I proceeded to deliver a soliloquy, a polished but approximate version of which it seems unfair to deprive the reader:
‘My desire further to investigate these semi-ruined objects, though personal in nature, nevertheless fits into a long Western tradition of preoccupation with the remnants of collapsing civilisations, which can be traced at least as far back as the eighteenth century. It was then that large numbers of ruin-gazers, Goethe among them, travelled to the Italian peninsula to admire the remains of ancient Rome, often by moonlight, deriving solace from the sight of once-grand palaces and theatres now covered in weeds and sheltering wolves and wild dogs. The Germans, always a proficient people in the coining of compound words, invented the term Ruinenlust to describe this new passion. It seems, in fact, that the more advanced a society is, the greater will be its interest in ruined things, for it will see in them a redemptively sobering reminder of the fragility of its own achievements. Ruins pose a direct challenge to our concern with power and rank, with bustle and fame. They puncture the inflated folly of our exhaustive and frenetic pursuit of wealth. It stands to reason, therefore, that a visitor to the United States, this most technologically developed of all modern societies, should take a particular interest in the flip side of the nation’s progress. The disintegrating Continental Airlines 747 visible outside of your window seems the equivalent, for myself, of what the Colosseum in Rome must have been for the young Edward Gibbon’.
There was a silence as my companion took in the eloquence, cultural range and sheer profundity of what I had just said. The buzz of the ultralight could still be heard high overhead. But the man was evidently disinclined by nature to pay extravagant compliments, for when he finally spoke, it was to say ‘Fuck off’ again with a resolve which his previous riposte had perhaps lacked – to which sentiment he then added, lest there remain any ambiguity, ‘Get the hell out of here before I shoot you in the ass’.
Fortunately, the man was not as unreasonable as this might have implied. He had a fine understanding of the value of money and a few twenty-dollar bills later, we had agreed that I would be free to wander around the site until he closed it at nightfall, though I would first have to sign a lengthy legal document guaranteeing that I (or in the event of my death, my relatives) would never attempt to sue him or his heirs for any injuries that I might incur due to the many dangers outside, which included but were not limited to razor-sharp pieces of severed aircraft wings, unstable fuselages and the triangular-headed Mojave