For those of us who must cross great distances and climes to reach our loved ones for the holiday season, the travel day usually includes a concentrated exposure to airports and airplanes, spaces disembedded from any sense of continuity from the surrounding terrain. If I read him correctly, these constitute what Arjun Appadurai calls ‘translocalities’–places that don’t properly belong to any region or nation or other well-defined geographical area. Airports are oppressive translocalities, regions of limbo, of high anxiety, of desperation. Most desperate of all are the attempts to localize these spaces. Memphis has its barbecue and Sun Studios shop, Vegas has its slot machines, Charlotte has its rocking chairs and LaGuardia has… well… ferociously miserable dullness, like it’s somehow umbilically connected to a dying shopping mall in Ohio.
When faced with these conditions, books are necessary. Books found in the airports themselves usually won’t do, unless you’re at PDX or MSP, in which case you may find something suitable. One book in particular is always useful. Pessoa’s Book of Disquietude. Granted, it’s useful in almost any situation, sort of like the Koran or the I Ching for the melancholy. For example, I turned to a random page and in section 213, found this: “We in this world are all living on board a ship that is sailing from one unknown port to another…” Not quite the holy grail of epiphanies, but uncannily appropriate. But later: “Good deeds are impositions; that’s why I categorically abhor them.” Something about statements like this just soothes the soul of the holiday traveler who is forced to endure the cognitive dissonance that comes from juxtaposing christmas cheer with packs of families all sporting bulging carry-ons while knocking into the slower-moving folks on the way to their gate. “I’m highly sociable in a highly negative way,” says Pessoa.
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