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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here.
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On Terminals and Turning Pages
Cameron Carr
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“An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves fuller investigation.” —Virginia Woolf
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London: July 18-21
George Eliot is going to ruin Christmas, but right now it’s still summer, I have not lost two and a half days of my life trying to travel internationally during the largest IT outage in history, I have not used Delta’s paltry apology flight credits to subsidize my Christmas flights, and I have not read any of Middlemarch. Yet I insist it is important to see George Eliot’s grave while visiting my partner’s twin sister in London, because we happen to be in George Eliot’s cemetery, and she is someone I see as important, like I have to use her full name on every reference. But though it feels important to see her grave, none of us have read any George Eliot. I take a quick photo of the tombstone and we move on. Later, we visit a bookstore and my partner’s sister buys a copy of Eliot’s—George Eliot’s—Middlemarch. I consider getting one too, but say I’ll check it out from the library instead, maybe because I don’t feel like carrying its 800-some pages with me while I travel. I promise to have it read by Christmas though, so we can talk about it when we see each other next.
Three days later, I leave England alone, starting on foot from a cottage on the outskirts of Bath at 5 a.m. London time. I follow the Avon River toward the station where I’ll catch a train to London before taking the tube to the airport. On my flight to Atlanta, the attendants serve “Mile High Tea”: two varieties of triangular sandwiches with cream cheese fillings between crustless bread, a scone with jam and “clotted cream” (whatever that means), and a cocoberry blush chocolate truffle. The whole trip is wholesome and delightful.
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Atlanta: July 21-22
Until landing, when the pilot announces our luggage had been left in the U.K. Then the flight delays begin. Soon my connection to Tucson is canceled with no replacement. An hour later, a Delta customer service representative tells me the earliest available flight is in three days and there are no open hotels, not that Delta would pay for one anyway. She recommends I “find a corner and curl up.”
I don’t curl up in a corner for the night. I spend the next two hours on Delta customer service hold, standing in line for another Delta customer service counter while thoroughly reviewing the official Delta Cancellations and Refunds policies, before booking a budget hotel. It takes ninety seconds to walk from the back of the line to the front. I know because I filmed it on my way out. Tomorrow, people will tell me they waited six hours.
It’s 11:12 p.m. when I start for the hotel. However, the Plane Train is out of service, meaning I have to walk from the international terminal in F Concourse to the rideshare pickup zone “a short walk from North and South baggage claim,” at the opposite end, long ways, of the 6.8 million-square-foot terminal complex. Despite my phone dying two minutes before my scheduled pickup time, I manage to find my driver at 1:23 a.m. local time—or, 6:23 a.m. London time, thirteen hours after I began my journey—three hours after I had expected to be home.
I will not dwell on my hotel stay beyond saying that there were cigarette holes in my comforter, my room’s door lock did not seem to work, and complimentary breakfast consisted of a drawer of white bread. My aim here is not to complain. My aim here is not to badmouth Delta. (I did eventually receive reimbursement for all my additional expenses, though not for my time.) My aim here is to confess that I love the airport, and that I even loved the fourteen hours I spent in the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport the next day. By 8 a.m., I had Taco Bell and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando open at a seat between two tables filled with families sleeping face down on their folded arms. It was great, if I didn’t think about it too much.
“The philosopher is right who says that nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy,” Woolf writes early in Orlando. I think she means that happiness can be split easily by melancholy, but I find it true too that sometimes melancholy is capable of cutting quick to happiness. Though a part of me did wish that before leaving London I had gotten a copy of Middlemarch to read.
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Phoenix: November 27
Which is why I am carrying Middlemarch with me now, four months later, on the pre-Thanksgiving drive from Tucson to the Phoenix airport: because I do some of my best reading in the airport and because I’m running out of time to read this book before Christmas. In truth, an airport is one of my favorite places to read—in truth, I generally like being in airports, which I know is not a universal feeling. But I like airports because in them I get to be somewhat untethered, which is maybe a strange thing to say about a place where it is prohibited to leave your personal and/or carry-on items unattended, but it’s how I feel.
Airports are liminal spaces, between two modes of existence. On one end there are the stresses of work, chores, errands, making food, cleaning up. On the other end, particularly with holidays and visiting family, there are the stresses of sleeping on couches and deservedly retired pillows, waking on someone else’s schedule, eating an unfamiliar diet, performing a select and approachable version of oneself, performing a constantly sociable and friendly version of oneself. However much I identify with these complaints (if you’re reading this Joe and Paige: sleeping in Zion’s bed actually rocked, and had I not known it was meant for a two-year-old, I wouldn’t have guessed it—though the log cabin-style safety railings (cute!) are a bit of a giveaway), however much ordinary life is a burden or vacation is an escape, I know that between these I will have the airport.
In an airport I feel I can be left alone, or I feel that it is reasonable to dwell alone when surrounded by people and commotion, which makes it a good place to read. Maybe sometimes it is hard to read without a timer, or sometimes it is hard to read when I’m always checking a timer. At the airport, the staff make an overhead announcement when it’s time for me to stop reading and start boarding, which really only means that I have to stop sitting and start reading standing up, which sometimes I do anyways because I get stiff sitting in the airport and on the airplane and in the car. In an airport, I seem to float, untethered from time—at least between TSA and final boarding.
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Detroit: November 27
But at Thanksgiving, things are not working out. The first problem is Brett. My stupid brother with his stupid idea that we align our connecting flights and his stupid Delta Sky Club membership with its stupid free buffet and its stupid luxury seating.
By the time I land in Detroit and find the Sky Club, Brett is already a few drinks deep. For some reason, everything is hued with green: his green Outdoor Voices hat, gray quarter-zip with green interior trim, olive pants. Even the Sky Club’s leather seats are a dark green—emerald almost. “I think,” says Middlemarch’s Dorothea as she and her sister compare the gems in their dead mother’s jewelry, “emerald is more beautiful than any of them.” She offers her sister all of it—except the emeralds. “They look like fragments of heaven,” she says, which is what my brother seems to think of the Delta Sky Club: a fragment of heaven, with its free drinks, free buffet, members-only access, elevated seating, elevated location. After entering, the doors close behind us and we start up an escalator—to heaven.
Inside, at the summit, we can only see the people in the terminal below, not hear them, which I realize is what I like: being in a place among people. I like reading in airports in the mutual discomfort of the terminal, all of us out of our element, waiting. It is a wonder we do not call airport terminals waiting rooms. Instead we call them terminals: ends. I do not go to airports for ends.
When we board our late-night flight to Buffalo, I can’t get the reading light to work. I fumble in the dark until I accidentally press the call light as we begin takeoff and a weary flight attendant announces to the whole plane that “we are not able to come to you at this time, please press your call button again to turn off the call light.” So I don’t read. George Eliot sits in the dark.
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Buffalo / Corning / Ellicottville: November 28-30
The next problem is Thanksgiving. No one wants you to sit quietly and read at a family gathering. So I don’t.
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Detroit: December 1
By Sunday, when Brett and I part ways back in Detroit, I’m only halfway through book two—there are eight “books” within Middlemarch, each around one hundred pages—but Christmas décor is “spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina.” On my flight to Phoenix, Christmas nears and ominous debts are coming due. It is just three days after Thanksgiving, but as I find a bench just shy of baggage claim, I fear that George Eliot is bound to ruin Christmas.
Middlemarch isn’t really my type of book. I don’t always love the nineteenth-century novel, or realism, or English aristocracy, or the classics. But I like reading it anyways, trying it at least. A good book can be a gate, because it opens to something or somewhere. And really it would be more accurate to place my airport reading there—not at a terminal, but a gate, the place where I do most of my waiting. A gate leads to something. And that’s why I read a book, especially a brick-sized one like Middlemarch (modular brick dimensions: 3.625” x 2.25” x 7.625”; Middlemarch Penguin Classics dimensions: 5.1” x 1.4” x 7.75”): to see where it might take me. That’s also why I like, sometimes, to be out in a place, among other beings, waiting at a gate. And if you know where you’re going, if you’ve already been there, if you’ve got a cozy corner with your name on it and some throw pillows indented with your body, if nothing is uncertain or unknown or open-ended, is it really a gate?
Still, in case I don’t like Middlemarch, I also packed my annotated copy of Tone by Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno, maybe because I want to think about what the tone inside an airport is, and I remember that Samatar and Zambreno, calling themselves the Committee to Investigate Atmosphere, are interested in the tones of spaces and in tones as spaces. “Tone is a window one looks out of and also a window one looks into,” they write. A window, like a sort of gate, an opening, an end of one space that is the beginning of another, a between, a joining.
“We were drawn to the subject of tone,” their committee writes, “because its vibrations informed us that we belonged to it; it did not belong to us.”
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Atlanta: July 22 / Nashville: July 22-23 / Salt Lake City: July 23 / Phoenix: July 23 / Tucson: July 23
Which is what the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport informs me. When I settle into the pre-terminal food court the morning after my arrival, I still have more than twelve hours till my next flight—twelve hours to wait, living in this tone. And then I have a layover, a couple flight delays, a final flight around 12:30 a.m. (that’s Nashville time—in London it is 6:30 a.m., more than 48 hours after I first left). But to get home Tuesday morning instead of Wednesday night I had to fly to Phoenix instead of Tucson, and the flight delays mean I’ve missed the last Greyhound, so when I land at 2 a.m. Arizona time (which is 5 a.m. for the eastern U.S., which is 10 a.m. for the U.K., which is all irrelevant to my body’s loss of any sense of time or functional circadian rhythm), I still have two hours to wait before the two-hour ride to Tucson before the thirty-minute walk to my apartment. From England, my partner texts me pictures of a cloudy morning tour of the Roman baths in Bath. Meanwhile, I slouch at a metal table and read Virginia Woolf’s fictional biography of Orlando. Over the course of a few hundred years—from the 1500s into 1928—he becomes she, carriages become motor cars, and Orlando ages from sixteen to thirty-eight. When, for Orlando, the clock struck four (p.m., London), “she kept…complete composure.” When, for me, the clock strikes four (a.m., Phoenix), I drool onto a Greyhound bus. For both of us, time passes in strange ways. We are “braced and strung up by the present moment.” I hardly sleep. I read. I wait.
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Somewhere: Sometime: I Don’t Know: Does It Really Matter?
Back—forward—at the Phoenix airport in late November, I wait for a friend to pick me up. I read Middlemarch, still with hundreds of pages to go. Will George Eliot ruin Christmas? I’m not sure. The first Christmas passed without event, but later Christmases within the book will be “threatening” and “dreary,” though I haven’t really read those pages yet, they’re in book seven and I’m still on book three. Right now, I’m just peeking ahead.
My phone buzzes. My friend says she’s close, so I walk outside.
The clock strikes twelve on Orlando as “the cold breeze of the present brushe[s] her face with its little breath of fear.”
From the Greyhound window, I watch the rising sun make mountains into blush-backed silhouettes.
In the final lines, George Eliot swears that “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts.” She offers tribute to “the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
At George Eliot’s grave, I walk away.
In Tucson, at 7 a.m., more than two and a half days after leaving London, I step inside my door.
Stepping outside, at the Phoenix airport, I watch a man scream into the passenger door of a stopped car. Only after a few unmeasurable moments does it become clear that he’s yelling “BACK UP! MY FOOT! MY FOOT!” No one knows what to do after the car rolls back and the young man leans against its side. Some people laugh and glance around complicitly. I wait for my ride. Time passes. The holiday approaches. We open the next door.
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Cameron Carr is a writer from Ohio. His writing appears in Longreads, The Missouri Review, The Hedgehog Review, and elsewhere.
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