But I take a different view of time. Every traveller’s time is a lot of times in one, quite a wide array. It is island time, archipelagos of order in an ocean of chaos; it is the time produced by the clocks in train stations, everywhere varying; conventional time, mean time, which no one ought to take too seriously. Hours disappear on an airplane aloft, dawn issues fast with afternoon and evening already on its heels. The hectic time of big cities you’re in for just a bit, wanting to fall into the clutches of its evening, and the lazy time of uninhabited prairies seen from the air.
I also think that the world will fit within, into a groove of the brain, into the pineal gland – it could well be just a lump in the throat, this globe. In fact, you could cough it right up and spit it out.
AIRPORTS
Enormous airports assemble us together on the promise of connection with our next flight; it is an order of transferral and of timetables in the service of motion. But even if we had nowhere else to go in the coming couple of days, it would still be worth getting to know these spaces.
Once they were in the outskirts, supplementing cities, like train stations. But now airports have emancipated themselves, so that today they have a whole identity of their own. Soon we may well say that it’s the cities that supplement the airports, as workplaces and places to sleep. It is widely known, after all, that real life takes place in movement.
In what possible way could airports be considered inferior to actual cities, nowadays? They hold conference centres, interesting art exhibits, festivals and product launches. They have gardens and promenades; they instruct: at Amsterdam’s Schiphol you can see excellent copies of Rembrandt, and there is an airport in Asia that has a museum of religion – a fabulous idea. We have access to good hotels and a wide variety of restaurants and bars from inside airports. There are little shops and supermarkets and shopping malls where you can not only stock up on provisions for the road, but also on souvenirs, in advance, so as to not waste any time once you get where you are going. There are gyms, places that offer both traditional and Eastern massage, hair stylists and customer service representatives from banks and mobile phone companies. And after satisfying the needs of our bodies, we can move on to spiritual succour at the numerous chapels and meditation spaces offered by airports. Sometimes they host readings and book signings for travellers. Somewhere in my backpack I still have the programme from one such event: ‘The History and Foundations of Travel Psychology’, ‘The Development of Seventeenth-Century Anatomy’.
Everything is well-lit; moving walkways facilitate the migration of travellers from one terminal to another so they may go, in turn, from one airport to another (sometimes at a distance of some sixteen hours of flight!) while a discreet staff ensures the flawlessness of this great mechanism’s workings.
They are more than travel hubs: this is a special category of city-state, with a stable location, but citizens in flux. They are airport-republics, members of a World Airport Union, and while they aren’t yet represented at the UN, it is only a matter of time. They are an example of a system where internal politics matter less than ties with other airport members of the Union – for only these provide them with their raison d’être. An example of an extroverted system, where the constitution is spelled out on every ticket, and where one’s boarding pass is one’s only identification as a citizen.
The number of inhabitants here always varies quite a bit. Interestingly, the population increases in fogs and storms. Citizens, so as to feel comfortable anywhere, must not be too eye-catching. Sometimes, as one is going down a moving walkway, one passes one’s brothers- and sisters-in-travel, who may give the impression of having been preserved in formaldehyde – as though everyone is peering out at everyone else from inside bell jars. In the airport-republic, your address is your seat on the plane: 7D, let’s say, or 16A. Those great moving belts whisk us away in opposite directions, some voyagers in cloaks and hats, others in shorts and Hawaiian shirts, eyes blurred by snow or skin darkened by the sun, seeped in the damp of the north, the scent of rotting leaves and softened earth, or bearing desert sand in the recesses of their sandals. Some bronzed or tanned or burned, others blindingly, fluorescently white. People who shave their heads and those who never get a haircut. The big and tall, like that man, and the delicate and petite, like that woman who only reaches up to his waist.
Airports also have a soundtrack, a symphony of airplane engines, a couple of simple sounds that extend into a space devoid of rhythm, an Orthodox twin-engine choir, gloomy minor, infrared, infrablack, largo, based on a single chord that bores even itself. A requiem that opens with the potent introitus of take-off and closes with an amen descending into landing.
RETURNING TO ONE’S ROOTS
Hostels ought to be sued for ageism: for some reason, they only offer accommodation to the young. The acceptable age range is determined on a hostel-by-hostel basis, but nowhere will a forty-year-old make the cut. Why should the young receive such special treatment? Are they not, even aside from this, showered with the privileges of biology itself?
Let us take as an example those backpackers who constitute the vast majority of hostel-goers: they are strong and tall – both the men and the women – with clear, glowing skin, and they rarely smoke, if at all, let alone take drugs, or at most a joint from time to time. They travel by ecologically friendly means – in other words, by land: overnight trains, packed long-distance buses. In some countries they even hitchhike. They get to their hostels at night, and as they dine they all begin to ask each other the Three Travel Questions: where are you from? Where are you coming in from? Where are you going? The first question determines the vertical axis, while the next two establish two horizontal axes. Thus these backpackers are able to create something like a coordinates system; when they have all situated one another on that map, they drift peaceably off to sleep.
The guy I met on the train was travelling, like so many of them, in search of his roots. His was a complicated journey: his grandmother on his mother’s side was a Russian Jew, his grandfather a Pole from Vilnius (now Lithuania); they left Russia with General Anders’ army and emigrated to Canada after the war. On his father’s side, meanwhile, his grandfather was Spanish, and his grandmother a Native American whose tribe I can’t recall the name of.
He was at the beginning of his trip, and he seemed rather overwhelmed.
TRAVEL SIZES
These days, any self-respecting pharmacy offers its customers a special range of travel-sized toiletries. Some places even set aside whole aisles. Here, one can obtain anything and everything one might want on a trip: shampoo, a tube of liquid soap to wash your underwear in the sink at the hotel, toothbrushes you can fold in half, sunscreen, insect repellant, shoe polish wipes (the whole gamut of colours is available), sets of feminine hygiene products, foot cream, hand cream. The defining characteristic of all of these items is their size – they are miniatures, tiny tubes and jarlets, itsy-bitsy bottles the size of one’s thumb: the smallest sewing kit fits three needles, five mini-skeins of different-coloured thread, each three metres in length, and two white emergency buttons and a safety pin. Of particular usefulness is the travel-sized hairspray, whose miniature container measures no more than a woman’s palm.
It is as if the cosmetics industry sees the phenomenon of travel as mirroring sedentary life, but in miniature, a cute little baby version of the same.