A Week at the Airport

With his review Alain de Botton’s A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary, Dan Hill adds another book to my to-read pile:

He is particularly good on the peculiar sense of pervasive yet largely internalised tension created by the emotional and psychological pressures of airports. He makes a series of acute observations predicated on this interplay between banal environment and heightened emotional intensity. Perhaps it’s that the situations are indeed essentially emotionally intense, often being a series of greetings and goodbyes, set to the backdrop of persistent minor failures of complex systems amidst the possibility of major disasters. It’s quite a brew. De Botton wryly skewers this extraordinary emotional confection, describing the long goodbyes of couples or the simmering cauldrons that are families on holiday.

“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 recognise by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without. There were men pacing impatiently and blankly 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 grey-green eyes and their mother’s cheeks, emerging from behind the stainless-steel gate, holding the hand of an airport operative.”