He dreamt of leaving France for somewhere else, somewhere far away, on another continent, with no reminders of ‘the everyday' (a term of horror for the poet)—somewhere with warmer weather, a place, in the words of the legendary couplet from Limitation au Voyage, where everything would be ‘ordre et beauté/Luxe, calme etvolupté'. But he was aware of the difficulties involved. He had once left the leaden skies of northern France and returned dejected. He had set off on a journey to India. Three months into the sea crossing, the ship had run into a storm and had stopped in Mauritius for repairs. It was the lush, palm-fringed island that Baudelaire had dreamt of. But he could not shake off a feeling of lethargy and sadness, and he suspected that India would be no better. Despite efforts by the captain to persuade him otherwise, he insisted on sailing back to France.
The result was a lifelong ambivalence towards travel. In Le Voyage, he sarcastically imagined the accounts of travellers returned from afar:
We saw stars
And waves; we saw sands, too; And despite many crises and unforeseen disasters,
We were often bored, just as we are here.
And yet he remained sympathetic to the wish to travel and observed its tenacious hold on him. No sooner had he returned to Paris from his Mauritian trip than he began to dream once again of going somewhere else. Noting, ‘Life is a hospital in which every patient is obsessed with changing beds: this one wants to suffer in front of the radiator, and that one thinks he'd get better if he was by the window,' he was nevertheless unashamed to count himself among the patients: ‘It always seems to me that I'll be well where I am not, and this question of moving is one that I'm forever entertaining with my soul.' Sometimes Baudelaire dreamt of going to Lisbon. It would be warm there, and he would, like a lizard, gain strength from stretching himself out in the sun. It was a city of water, marble and light, conducive to thought and calm. But almost from the moment he conceived this Portuguese fantasy, he would start to wonder if he might not be happier in Holland. Then again, why not Java or the Baltic or even the North Pole, where he could bathe in shadows and watch comets fly across the Arctic skies? The destination was not really the point. The true desire was to get away—to go, as he concluded, ‘anywhere! anywhere! so long as it is out of the world!'
Baudelaire honoured reveries of travel as a mark of those noble, questing souls whom he described as ‘poets', who could not be satisfied with the horizons of home even as they appreciated the limits of other lands, whose temperaments oscillated between hope and despair, childlike idealism and cynicism. It was the fate of poets, like Christian pilgrims, to live in a fallen world while refusing to surrender their vision of an alternative, less compromised realm.
Against such ideas, one detail stands out in Baudelaire's biography: he was, throughout his life, strongly drawn to harbours, docks, railway stations, trains, ships and hotel rooms, and felt more at home in the transient places of travel than in his own dwelling. When he was oppressed by the atmosphere in Paris, when the world seemed ‘monotous and small', he would leave, ‘leave for leaving's sake', and travel to a harbour or train station, where he would inwardly exclaim:
Carriage, take me with you! Ship, steal me away from here!
Take me far, far away. Here the mud is made of our tears!
In an essay on the poet, T. S. Eliot proposed that Baudelaire was the first nineteenth-century artist to give expression to the beauty of modern travelling places and machines. ‘Baudelaire… invented a new kind of romantic nostalgia,' wrote Eliot: ‘the poesie des departs, the poesie des sattes d'attente! And, one might add, the poesie des stations-service and the poesie des aéroports.
3.
When feeling sad at home, I have often boarded a train or airport bus and gone to Heathrow, where, from an observation gallery in Terminal 2 or from the top floor of the Renaissance Hotel along the north runway, I have drawn comfort from the sight of the ceaseless landings and takeoffs of aircraft.
In the difficult year of 1859, in the aftermath of the Fleurs du Mal trial and his breakup with his mistress Jeanne Duval, Baudelaire visited his mother at her home in Honfleur and, for much of his two-month stay, occupied a chair at the quayside, watching vessels docking and departing. ‘Those large and beautiful ships, invisibly balanced (hovering) on tranquil waters, those hardy ships that look dreamy and idle, don't they seem to whisper to us in silent tongues: ‘When shall we set sail for happiness?'
Seen from a car park beside 09L/27R, as the north runway is known to pilots, the 747 appears at first as a small, brilliant white light, a star dropping towards earth. It has been in the air for twelve hours. It took off from Singapore in the late morning. It flew over the Bay of Bengal, Delhi, the Afghan desert and the Caspian Sea. It traced a course over Romania, the Czech Republic and southern Germany before beginning its descent, so gently that few passengers would have even noticed a change of tone in the engines, above the grey-brown, turbulent waters off the Dutch coast. It followed the Thames over London, turned north near Hammersmith (where the flaps began to unfold), pivoted over Uxbridge and straightened course over Slough. From the ground, the white light gradually takes shape as a vast, two-storeyed body with four engines suspended like earrings beneath implausibly long wings. In the light rain, clouds of water form a veil behind the plane on its matronly progress towards the airfield. Beneath it are the suburbs of Slough. It is three in the afternoon. In detached villas, kettles are being filled. A television is on in a living room, its sound switched off. Green and red shadows move silently across walls. The everyday. And above Slough is a plane that a few hours ago was flying over the Caspian Sea. Slough/the Caspian: the plane a symbol of worldliness, carrying within itself a trace of all the lands it has crossed, its eternal mobility offering an imaginative counterweight to feelings of stagnation and confinement.
This morning the plane was over the Malay Peninsula, a place-name in which there linger the smells of guava and sandalwood. And now, a few metres above the earth that it has avoided for so long, the plane appears motionless, its nose raised upwards, seeming to pause before its sixteen rear wheels meet the tarmac with a blast of smoke that makes manifest its speed and weight.
On a parallel runway, an A340 ascends for New York and, over the Staines Reservoir, retracts its flaps and wheels, which it won't require again until the descent over the white clapboard houses of Long Beach, three thousand miles and eight hours of sea-and-cloud away. Visible through the heat haze of turbofans, other planes wait to start their journeys. All across the airfield, planes are on the move, their fins a confusion of colours against the grey horizon, like sails at a regatta.