Perhaps you remember the film Up in the Air, released a decade ago. George Clooney plays an international corporate “downsizer” who fires people for a living. While doing so, he travels the globe relentlessly, in a very real sense living from airport hub to airport hub. He’s the ultimate loner, with no fixed abode, who (the plot thickens) happens to run into Anna Kendrick, a bonafide “fellow traveler.” It’s a romance with a twist, and time has been kind to this whimsical film; check it out if you’ve never seen it.
Having been lucky enough to have journeyed just about everywhere, I find myself thinking about Clooney’s character whenever I travel. So does Up in the Air director Jason Reitman. “Yesterday I took my tenth flight in 10 days,” he said on the eve of the film’s release in 2009, “so I live that life myself and I kind of enjoy it. I think when you’re in an airplane, it’s the last refuge for the people who enjoy being alone and reading a book.”
As someone whose first flight was from Boston to New York City on a school trip to the 1964 World’s Fair, I’ve always felt that flying was something of a transcendental experience. Decades later, I continue to be amazed at my good fortune at having been born into the only century in human history when such flights of fancy were actually possible. And yes, as Reitman says, there’s nothing quite like reading a good book (or these days, maybe a Kindle) while looking out an airplane window, feeling like you’re lord and master of all you survey.
Recently, however, I’ve noticed a subtle change in our basic flying experiences, something that indicates that we seem less homo sapiens these days, and more just individual bowls of brain mush connected to what once was called the World Wide Web, but today is simply a vast virtual universe.
Flying home from Paris last summer, I was patting myself on the back for scoring an aisle seat near the front of the plane, when I suddenly realized just how much the air-travel experience has changed in the decade since Up in the Air was released. We took off, and I settled into my pseudo-roomy seat, pulling out my New Yorker and my Kindle, when suddenly the entire plane went dark. No, it wasn’t a power outage, but simply the simultaneous shutting of a hundred window shades, as nearly everyone on board turned their attention to the video monitors in front of them. Most of those whose screens remained off were focused on their own hand-held devices.
Otherwise, all was darkness, except for maybe four window seats whose shades remained up, and whose occupants remained in contact with the actual world outside. Not to mention each other; inside this 787, all was quiet, as if this were a late-night flight, not the morning one on which we were in fact traveling.
The scene seemed bizarre: a couple of hundred passengers traveling in near-silence, in a thin aluminum tube moving across the Atlantic. Except for the cacophony of flickering lights emanating from row upon row of video screens, I felt almost as if I were sailing in steerage across the same ocean on the ship that brought my Irish ancestors to America nearly two centuries ago.
The silence, as they say, was deafening. I have to say I’ve learned over the years not to strike up conversations with every seat-mate, but on occasion I've had memorable hours-long conversations with complete strangers whom I never saw again. One time I was upgraded to first class en route to South America, when legendary Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski plopped down in the seat next to me. “Coach K,” I said politely, knowing we’d be stuck together for six hours, “I promise not to say a word about basketball.” He laughed heartily, and we had quite the fine time solving many of the world’s then-current problems.
How times have changed, as so many seem to travel tethered to their digital devices at all times. Myself, I now always request window seats these days. At least during daylight hours, I thus can peacefully read a book or a magazine, all while looking out the window across a magnificent sky, in my own mind, at least, an aviation pioneer.
