Here We Are

And now I am, again, aboard an airplane. There’s that moment in the movie Up In The Air when George Clooney’s character is welcome to the exclusive 10,000,000 mile club on American Airlines. As a token of their appreciation, the airline sits him beside one of their most senior pilots, who asks him, “Where you from?” Clooney answers, “Here.”

That’s how I sometimes feel, up here, winging towards one city or another. In this instance I am heading home, thankfully, following a month of travel, which, itself, came on the heels of my weekly commute from Savannah to New York City for our tapings of Have I Got News For You.

I’m a window seat guy. How anybody can be anything other than a window seat guy is beyond me. The window seat has so many things going for it: control over the shades, a wall against which to lean one’s head, and the surety of knowing that you will not have to stand to accommodate anybody else’s bladder. Nor do I ever ask to leave my aisle. Though I am now an older gentleman, I am blessed with the urinary carrying capacity of a much younger person. My prostate will probably begin to have some words on that front in the coming years, but for now, I remain master of my domain.

I can’t say I enjoy flying. Who does? Most of the time it sucks for all the reasons we can all agree it sucks. And yet… look at the view. Appreciate the miracle of jet travel. A species that primarily traveled by foot or on the backs of beasts until, basically, yesterday, now has the ability to distribute tiny bags of potato chips to each other in a metal tube racing 600 miles an hour through the atmosphere. Yes, we also figured out how to make the experience as miserable as possible in the name of profit, but the aesthetics of the journey need not detract from the technological achievement.

When flying, I try to pay attention to my surroundings, at least a little. As I type, we’re heading down the East Coast, the Atlantic Ocean on my port side. I like looking at all the tributaries carrying the nation’s waters home. I like how water is water, and behaves the way water behaves, whether by the spoonful or the sea-full.

One can get a fragmentary sense of our home even at this height, a few miles above the surface. We can see neat patches of farmland and small lakes and the bright lights of high school football fields. We can see how neatly the sky meets the sea, how they sometimes dissolve into each other, erasing the boundary between where creatures walk and where they fly.

There’s also a sense of dislocation that comes from too much air travel. I can’t tell you the number of times I have awakened in bed over the last couple months without knowing where I am. Home, I think for a moment, before realizing, no, I am not home. But where am I? Chicago, perhaps? Or Pittsburgh? No, that was a few days ago. And then, like one of those old, room-sized computers, I can hear the clickety-clack of circuits connecting me to my location.

I sort of like that feeling, and there have been mornings when I have tried to keep myself within that cocoon of mystery as long as I can before my brain insists on identifying my surroundings. Those few moments of wonderment scramble my whole identity. Who am I if I don’t know where am I? The blankness has a disconcerting quality to it, of course, but there’s also something pleasant about it. To be untethered to place is to untethered to… anything.

I wonder how astronauts experience their own sense of place when living orbiting the planet. What is that first moment like, when they awake, zipped into bags, hair floating about their faces like vermicelli? Do they sometimes awaken and feel as though they are back in the womb? You might know the phrase “The Overview Effect,” which describes common sensations of awe astronauts feel when looking at our planet from a distance, and the recognition that this tiny bubble with its atmosphere as thin as plastic wrap contains the entirety of humanity and birds and jellyfish and that baby Chinese hippo and everything else we have ever known.

William Shatner, upon returning from his brief joyride aboard Jeff Bezo’s rocket in 2022, found himself shattered by the experience, saying, “It was the death that I saw in space and the lifeforce that I saw coming from the planet — the blue, the beige and the white. And I realized one was death and the other was life."

My Delta flight has not been nearly so dramatic. Thankfully, despite a spate of accidents over the last month, air travel is rarely dramatic. It is, instead, mundane. Banal. This miracle dreamt of by every civilization that looked to the stars is now commonplace, vaguely unpleasant. I mean, Icarus died so I could get barely-functioning Wifi 35,000 feet closer to the sun?

We’re all hurtling through space, of course, passengers strapped to a little planet orbiting a little star in an average galaxy in an unremarkable galactic cluster. When we say we’re “here,” it’s a misnomer. The place we thought we were only moments ago is now miles behind us. The place to which we are traveling is already here, and already gone. That sense of certainty about where we are is as illusory as David Blane floating above the sidewalk. Which make it doubly annoying that I’m stuck here for the moment, scraping the last bits of crumbs from my bag of chips. Also, I’m being told to put away my laptop as we prepare for our “final descent”, a phrase I have always found needlessly morbid. Hopefully, this will only be the latest in a long line of arrivals, rather than a final one. Then again, if this turns out to be the last flight I take, that would be fine with me.