Airplane travel

We don’t travel on airplanes, we are shipped from one location to another like parcels of fish.

Sure, there are windows from which we can observe the clouds, if any, and the topography, which looks so little like the maps we’ve filed in our memories that we can barely recognise our location. That’s why some like to watch the display of the flight path over a vaguely aerial view of the ground. The alternative is to watch a movie, which seems a more honest admission that we can’t experience flight as travel.

Travel requires not only movement, but the sensation, the awareness, the feeling of movement. There is none such when we fly in a modern aircraft. The plane may as well be standing still somewhere in space with the surroundings flowing past. A car isn’t much different: we sit still in the car, and the road, the landscape, the air move past us. Does this mean the car is moving? Hard to say, until something interrupts the motion of the car, and we move inside the car and possibly out of it. The absence of the sensation of movement explains why driving and flight simulators work so well.                                

Travel requires agency. We move ourselves, by moving our limbs. We move across and through our surroundings. In a plane, in a car, in a train, we are carried by the machine. The only machine that enables us to travel is the bicycle, which we cause to move by moving our limbs, just as we cause our body to move by moving our limbs.

“Travel by airplane” misrepresents what’s actually happening. The plane transports us, just as it transports our bags.  Just like a parcel of fish.

Portland Holiday (2015)

     Peter Kirchmeir. Portland Holiday (2015) Privately printed by my brother. A nicely done, chatty account of a month in Portland by my brother and sister-in-law, house- and cat-sitting for their son and daughter-in-law. I think it’s a good travelogue for the city, so if you know Peter and can scrounge or borrow a copy, read it. Fun and informative. Too much reliance on the spell-checker for proof-reading, a failing of pretty well all printed matter these days. *** (and yes, I’m biased).

Michael Pitts, Footprints Through Avebury (1992)

     Michael Pitts, Footprints Through Avebury (1992) This is one of those thorough and beautifully organised and illustrated guide books that the British do so well. I have found no others like it anywhere in the world. This one takes the reader/walker on a series of walks in and around Avebury, noting everything worth seeing (at least to someone – tastes will differ), and providing brief histories of them all. The walks range in length from a few hundred metres to a few kilometres in length. The sights range in age from several thousand years to a few decades. Not the kind of book one reads just for fun, unless one has an obsessive interest in pre-historic Britain; but one that one would re-read after one’s visit as a reminder of the pleasures of seeing what there is to see. As Yogi Berra said, You can learn a lot by just looking; and one can learn a lot more when one has a friendly, lucid guide such as this booklet. **** (2003)

Humbert Fink. Kärnten (1998) (book review)

     Humbert Fink. Kärnten (1998) A book of lovely photographs of the Province, along with an introductory essay which is written in that terribly convoluted academic style that so many educated Germans and Austrians think they must inflict on their readers. It was sent to Mother and Father as a gift, and I got it when Roswita was sorting Mother’s things. It’s worth looking at, and reminds us of our happy visits with our Carinthian cousins. Pictures ****, text * (2003)