This past week, writer Alain de Botton has served as writer-in-residence for Heathrow Airport.
The notion is to capture the airport in real time: describe the intensely private moments between travelers played out on a stage so public that there is no audience, only all the rest of us passing through, focused on our own destinations and our own dramas — people in the bubble-space that airports make. People saying hello, goodbye, why do you have to go, why won’t you come with me? And de Botton is also exploring the private areas of the airport, the guts of the place and the people who keep it going, all the complex machinery and process and systems and training which most of us only experience as a step to wherever we’re going: Please place all metal objects in the tray. The doors are about to close: please step away from the doors. Collect your baggage at Claim Area 16.
Here’s an excerpt of de Botton’s real-time writing during his week in residence:
Some lovers were parting. She must have been twenty, he a few years older. Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood was in her bag. They had oversize sunglasses and had come of age in the period between SARS and swine flu. They were dressed casually in combat trousers and T-shirts. It was the intensity of their kiss that first attracted my attention, but what had seemed like passion from afrar was revealed at closer range to be unusual devastation. — Alain de Botton, in Heathrow Airport
We’re different writers; already my writer-self has been itching to get in there next to him and write it my way. And that tells me more than anything that I want a gig like this. It goes right to the center of my love of story, my fascination with what human beings do and say and feel and want, and my intense interest in how things work (on mechanical, structural, process and human levels). I’d love to have this kind of access and freedom and space to weave together the story of a place by telling stories of its systems and its people.
Airport; large hotel, or an island resort; train station, or a passenger train on a long journey; bus station; stadium; theatre; border crossing; an enormous outdoor concert space; a state fair… and that’s just off the top of my head.
Someone please give me a week of this, she said to the universe.
And where would you like to be writer-in-residence for a week, or where would you enjoy reading about if they had one?
Howdy,
I am pretty sure Amsterdam would be my destination of choice.
Have you ever been?
Sex, drugs and rock’ n’ roll never gets old.
All it needs is a different spin.
Mail me if you get an angle.
cheers.
Paul.
I would find any medium to large-sized archaeological excavation a great place to be a writer-in-residence. CRM or research, it wouldn’t matter to me – though CRM has a certain draw to it for me because CRM shovel jockeys are so transient. Everybody knows somebody who knows somebody whose floor you can crash out on for the duration of the project, and hopefully you’ll find somebody who knows somebody who can recommend you to the head of project x when project y folds or project y’s permit falls through and you find yourself yet again unemployed. You get some unusual pairings and friendships out of the chaos. I miss it dearly.
We spent hours in the Heathrow international terminal on our way to and from India last month. Both times it was an amazing swirl of European and South Asian travelers, either swimming in a pool duty-free eye candy or giving in to the undertow of jetlag. Young Italians in the flashiest gear sitting next to ancient Sikhs with white turbans and beards to their breastbones. And, unlike in American airports, places to sleep, where you could commandeer a couch and lie down like the refugee you feel yourself to be, when you’ve just gotten off a seven-hour flight and you’re about to board an eight-hour connection, and you’ve already forgotten what day it is. Visiting there as a writer, but not as a traveler, would be like going to a Dead concert in 1969 but not taking the acid.