1.
During a time when I was finding it hard to write anything and often spent whole days on my bed wondering about the point of my work, I received a phone call from a Slovenian newspaper, which I had never heard of until then, asking if I might want to travel to Paris on their behalf in order to write an article about the airshow at Le Bourget airport, a major biannual event in the aerospace calendar, where manufacturers gather before the world’s airlines and air forces and try to interest them in wheels, radars, missiles and cabin curtains.
The editor hoped that I might be able to convey to his readers, some one hundred thousand people in Ljubljana and its surrounding hills, what he termed ‘the ecstasies of flight’ and encouraged me to keep an eye out for any technological breakthroughs which might be poised to transform aviation (‘Showers in the sky?’ he suggested by way of an example). Though he apologised for a meagre fee and accommodation in a budget hotel overlooking a motorway into Paris, he added that he had passes to many important press conferences, including one at which a member of the royal family of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Ahmed Bin Saif Al Nahyan, was scheduled to announce an order for twenty-two A380s, with which he planned to cement his emirate into a pre-eminent place on the duty-free map of the globe.
Because the fair was, at least in its first couple of days, tightly restricted to aerospace professionals and the press, it had an atmosphere of calm and easy conviviality, of the kind one might find between guests at a wedding. It was not uncommon to chat to people in the queue for bottled water or, above the sound of a G550 spy-plane pirouetting around the skies of the Ile-de-France, to strike up a conversation with a stranger eating a pain au chocolat on an adjoining seat, thereby opening one’s eyes to new horizons, for example, to the tenor of life as a colonel in the air force of Gabon.
The exhibition halls next to the runway had been divided up by country, which revealed national tempers as these were articulated in aircraft parts. The Swiss specialised in flight instruments, the Brazilians were pre-eminent in propellers and the Ukrainians were attempting, against many odds, to establish themselves in landing gears and metal alloys.
Although the goods on sale were uncommonly expensive, customers shopping for aircraft equipment were presumed not to be impervious to the techniques of the high street and hence to the appeal of a former Miss Sweden dressed in a catsuit, or the lure of a raffle for a free weekend at Euro Disney. At lunchtime, many companies cleared space on their stands to serve up food from their regions, in the hope that a prospective buyer who had decided against a mid-air refuelling tanker from Galicia might glance more favourably upon it in the wake of some slices of dry-cured ham. The representatives of a factory from the foot of the Urals had brought with them a large, linen-wrapped cheese which they carved with a penknife into small cubes, arranging them around the pedestal of a flag of the Russian Federation to inspire goodwill towards the enterprise’s chief offering: wheel braces for military cargo aircraft.
Pathos naturally gathered around some of the less frequented stands. It was evident that in no part of the aerospace industry could one be certain of escaping from ruinous competition. Even extreme specialisation – in anti-oxidation systems for wing flaps, for example – carried little guarantee of immunity from rival suitors. There seemed to be no item in the world that five alternative manufacturers had not already simultaneously embarked upon producing. Nevertheless, the bankrupt nature of a business was not always a sufficient argument against it. High up in the Saudi Arabian government, a decision had been taken to reserve a stand representing the nation’s aerospace industry, notwithstanding that no such thing could, in fairness, have been said actually to exist. Twice the size of a normal stall, the Saudi showcase boasted chandeliers, leather sofas and walls wrapped in a sandy felt evocative of the colours of the Taif Mountains. But because there was little for him to discuss, the manager mostly sat by himself, dressed in a maroon suit and tie, silently surveying a stainless-steel platter of dates. To have omitted to come to Paris would have been tantamount to admitting that Saudi Arabia did not build planes, hence that it was uninterested in technological innovation and had abandoned any claim to be counted among forward-looking nations. And yet to have attended, and in such style, only offered surreptitious confirmation of the very problem to which the stand had been proposed as the daring answer.
The displays manned by Russia and its sister states tackled their difficulties with greater vigour. Aeronautical purchases which further west would have required compliance with drawn-out bureaucratic regulations were here sanguinely waved through. It was possible to make an immediate downpayment on a missile system or a Soviet-era satellite, items frequently promoted with the help of short films, perhaps representing a manager’s first efforts at cinematography, and which showed machines blasting into the air to the accompaniment of a muscular American-inflected commentary. After being ignored for so long, the arts of salesmanship were now practised with unusual alacrity by people who had assiduously read translations of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Unfortunately, as in so much of the consumer world, recognisable brand names were an essential means of providing reassurance, an issue which the Volga Advanced Passenger Aircraft Company appeared to be finding no easy way to circumvent.
In search of technological breakthroughs, I made my way to a display touting a Japanese manufacturer’s new seventy-seat commuter plane, which promised significantly lowered operating costs thanks to certain improvements, whose precise nature was hard to grasp, in its wing design. A full-scale replica of the interior had been shipped to Paris in crates from Yokohama and could be toured by appointment. After an exchange of business cards, I was led inside by two diffident men, in charge of sales and marketing, who locked the door of the quasi-jet behind me, took seats on either side of the aisle and stared mutely ahead towards an imaginary cockpit. I hoped that through some piece of fun-fair trickery, the machine might now seem to fly, but it appeared that the visit (which good manners dictated would have to last a while) was to have no particular theme or focus, being designed solely to allow customers to examine the seat fittings and the galley – on whose quality I dutifully complimented my hosts, as if they had made them themselves. With the door closed, the noise of the fair had died away, causing the three of us to become uncomfortably aware of the difficulties of human communication. I began to imagine that we had in fact left the outskirts of Paris and were journeying through a part of the stratosphere informed by the purple light which washed in through the windows from the adjoining Pratt & Whitney stand. After an age, the door was reopened, we made our way out and the head of marketing handed me a set of postcards of the plane, adding that he looked forward to meeting me again – though I sensed an atmosphere of melancholy around the enterprise which made me question whether the company would ever succeed in achieving its desired supremacy in the medium-sized regional jet market.
At the stand of the world’s second-largest engine manufacturer, I spent some minutes observing an unusually attractive young saleswoman with shoulder-length chestnut hair, dressed in a beige suit, who was biting the nail of her left index finger and crossing her slender legs whilst leaning against a large fan blade. She was not the first of her type I had seen that day, but something about her appearance left me thoughtful. I had until then believed that the vendors’ frequent and deliberate reliance on feminine appeal was merely a vulgar stratagem intended to win over airline executives, through an implicit suggestion that a purchase might bring them closer to intimacy with a sales agent. Now I began to see the matter differently: it seemed obvious that no order, however lucrative, would actually render these women available to buyers, so their presence on the stands took on a more poignant and commercially effective dimension. Their real function was to serve as a reminder of the unavailability of beauty to an overwhelmingly male, middle-aged and harried-looking base of customers. The women were goading the men to lay aside all romantic ambitions and to focus instead on their business and technological agendas. Rather than seductresses, they were in truth spurs to sublimation, and symbols of everything that the buyers would be better off if they forgot about in order to concentrate on the thousands of pieces of precisely engineered equipment arranged around the halls.
For my part, led on by the priorities of the Slovenian news paper, I went to a few press conferences. There was almost always an initial problem with the microphone. Men sat at tables decorated with the flags of their respective companies and announced deals before handfuls of journalists. It was often difficult to discover what the significance of these agreements might be, for they were framed in a language of acronyms that repelled the curiosity of minds nourished on the undemanding fare of the ordinary press. I read in Flight Daily News that UPS had chosen ADS-B for their next generation avionics, while Aviation International reported that Klimov was putting a VK800 against the P&WC PT6. The obscurity of these events, on which depended the livelihoods of many in factories across continents, only served to underline the marginality of the stories normally found in the daily paper, which has no option but to focus on murders, divorces and films, for its readers cannot be expected to follow in detail any of the real developments which unfold obscurely in the realms of science and economics and on which our future depends.
Many countries had sent military delegations to survey and order new equipment. On the way to the fair from the hotel, it was not uncommon to encounter a high-ranking member of one of the world’s poorer air forces sitting on a commuter train, his row of medals hinting at martial achievements far removed from the routines of his fellow passengers bound for the office. It was on just such a train on the last morning of the air show that I began chatting with three representatives of a central Asian republic. Each of them was carrying a small bag, containing a towel and a change of underwear, because their hotel, which forced me to re-evaluate the merits of my own, had a broken boiler and the airmen had heard that there were shower facilities in the exhibition halls.
They were principally interested in twin-engine strike aircraft. Though they could not lay claim to the sums required for a Typhoon Eurofighter, they nevertheless approached its manufacturer with the confidence of well-seasoned negotiators, their haughtiness implying that they would have no trouble finding a range of alternative delta-winged machines elsewhere if suitable terms could not be agreed.
The Eurofighter salesman led them up a small ladder to the cockpit. There seemed to be a struggle for leadership among the men and some harsh-sounding words were exchanged before they worked out the order in which they would have their turns at the controls, while each of those left waiting looked on suspiciously at his two colleagues, alert for any signs of unfavourable treatment. Through the glass canopy, the view across the runway was of a row of small terraced houses, many with washing hanging on the line. But when my new friends took the joystick, their eyes appeared to be somewhere else entirely, perhaps imagining the aircraft at Mach 2 over the Pamir Mountains heading down along the Fedchenko Glacier, after unloading on their enemy a battery of Storm Shadow air-to-ground missiles, thereby putting behind them the humiliations of former conflicts, with freezing nights in caves and the smell of camels’ breath in the dewy dawn.
Towards the close of the fair’s final afternoon session, I learnt that Sheikh Ahmed Bin Saif Al Nahyan had cancelled his visit due to the illness of a favourite falcon, and would instead put out a press release outlining the main points of his $22 billion purchase. Wishing to delay for as long as possible my return to an empty hotel room, I wandered through the Airbus stand, inspecting see-through model fuselages of yet-to-be-built aeroplanes, admiring the meticulous rows of miniature seats arranged inside and reflecting on the ambitious plans in the works for the future of Business class. Now that most of the delegates had left, cleaning crews arrived and set about wiping fingerprints off engines and rearranging brochures on countertops. The insistent hum of their vacuum cleaners seemed to call into question the significance of what was referred to by its manufacturer as the Airbus family, and for the first time in days, I found myself thinking of something other than aviation.
I should not have worried about my evening, for when I got back to my hotel, I discovered that a closing-night celebration was in progress. Realising that the majority of their guests were connected to the fair, the management had seen an opportunity to raise additional revenue by throwing a pay-as-you-go party at the bar. Here was my chance to meet in the flesh people whom I had over the previous few days been able only to imagine on the bases of the whirring sounds made by their toilet-roll dispensers, and their sides of mobile-phone conversations, as heard through the thin and even bendy walls which separated us. The hotel did not seem to have been housing anyone in a position either to buy or sell a plane: such dignitaries were more likely to have booked into the Crillon in central Paris, and at that moment were perhaps sailing around the Île de la Cité on the Boeing-sponsored dinner cruise, searching for appropriate remarks to make about the illuminated flying buttresses of Notre Dame, first built by stonemasons in the 1240s. By contrast, this place was the preferred lodging for those known within the industry as Tier 3 or 4 suppliers, people involved in the manufacture of smaller and less sophisticated parts of aircraft, or indeed, even further from the end product, in the fabrication of the tools required to form these parts.
Over an Orangina-based cocktail, I made the acquaintance of a salesman from Fort Worth, Texas. His company produced the rubber hoses responsible for circulating oxygen, fuel and oil around commercial jets. With unintended lyricism, he described to me how these prosthetic veins sent their liquids coursing under passengers’ seats as they soared obliviously over cloud-covered seas towards their objectives. Sensing my interest, he bent down and pulled out of his oversized accountant’s briefcase a brochure showing three grey warehouses with red stripes across their rooflines, located on an industrial estate near Dallas–Fort Worth airport. ‘No other company can equal our track record of providing horizontal, integrated fuel solutions’, the document declared – though the sales director’s choice of hotel seemed proof that not every potential client had been prepared to second this buoyant assessment.
Despite the fact that the occasion marked the end of a few days of hard work, many of the partygoers were feeling anxious, whether about orders, stock levels, Civil Aviation Authority regulations or the skittish exchange rate of the dollar. There was particular distress at the news that Northrop Grumman was planning to revamp its procurement process. A man whose business specialised in corrosion checks shared with me his suspicion that he and his wife had chosen the very worst time to renovate their home near Cheyenne, Wyoming, a place name that inanely evoked for me an image of an archetypal log cabin, like the one I had once recently seen in an outsize canvas by the nineteenth-century American landscape painter Thomas Cole.
Troublingly, there was no substantial food to be had, so that as we talked, my interlocutor and I were forced to rely to an unwise degree on crisps and salted nuts. We also made some inroads on the cocktail menu, being conscious that we were not going to be able to solve all our problems that night and surmising that we might, therefore, be better off attempting to lose track of them for a few hours with chemical assistance.
On my way back to our table from the bar, carrying a third round, I was struck by what seemed like a profound realisation that the air show was only one of hundreds of industry-specific events taking place at that moment around the world, filling airport concourses with delegates, providing custom for the makers of rolling suitcases, giving life to motorway-side motels and supporting careers in the pornographic film industry. There were conventions devoted to seaside condos and dental equipment, waste management and pharmaceuticals, weddings and caravans. And behind these fairs, there were confirmation faxes being sent to Sheratons and Best Westerns, and room-service trays, some decorated with sliced pickles, wending their way from kitchens to guest rooms down the lugubrious passageways of Crowne Plazas and Fairfield Inns & Suites.
A disco ball started spinning, and along with it ABBA. Because it had been a long day and it was unlikely that any of us would ever meet again, it did not seem inappropriate to dance, especially when the speakers began throbbing to ‘Super Trouper’, a song whose obscure lyrics hinted at an international liaison facilitated by the very planes that had inspired our gathering.
The delegates danced to forget the anxieties of salesmanship and to shake off the nervous anticipation generated by industry gossip. They danced to stop thinking about the dynamic future of aviation, with its next generation of afterburners and electromechanical flight decks, its promises of low-fuel-burning engines and nanotechnological wings. With the help of the disco ball, we managed to restore ourselves to the imperfect present, as constituted by a dimly lit bar next to a motorway somewhere in the midst of an industrial cityscape of factories and convention centres. We held one another’s moist palms and swayed across the tiled floor, gaining relief through our shared humanity – our stomachs bloated from too many nuts, our waistlines expanding, our digestions unhealthy, our sleep interrupted, our expenses fiddled – creatures who occasionally looked up at the stars but remained essentially and defiantly earthbound.
2.
The experience of the air show stayed with me. I began to think differently about planes. When airborne, I assessed the seat upholstery, the ailerons and the light fittings and dwelt on what their inclusion on board presupposed: exchanges of business cards, grey warehouses, salesmen’s suitcases and cubes of cheese arranged on plates at convention stands. I no longer regarded the plastic casing around the windows as either inevitable or natural, but as the patiently refined result of a manufacturing process once agreed upon by two men on a podium with flags in front of them, captured by a photographer from Flight Daily News.
Half a year later, I was invited to give a lecture at California State University in Bakersfield, a two-hour drive north of where I was staying in Los Angeles. It was my intention to complete the round trip in a day, but as I headed out of Bakersfield in the middle of the afternoon – after a lecture notable for its near-unanimous absence of attendees – I took a wrong exit, onto a divided motorway which funnelled me irrevocably in a south-easterly direction, into the Mojave Desert.
Signs of civilisation rapidly disappeared, ceding the field to a ceaseless repetition of barren lunar valleys – though to suggest that this landscape looked like the moon was unfairly to deflect responsibility for a bleakness which was patently not our neighbouring planet’s alone. Vultures circled overhead. Occasionally, after a few miles of terrain unaltered since the end of the last ice age, there would be renewed evidence of man’s presence, and hence a fresh opportunity to wonder at our species’ strangeness, especially our inclination to put up billboards even in the most desolate areas that read, ‘Great Fahitas, Low Prices’. There were scattered ruins, too: stone cabins missing their roofs and windows, crumbling slowly back into the desert, looking so ancient that it seemed inconceivable they could have been put up by gold prospectors only in the 1880s, rather than by a group of itinerant Roman legionnaires some centuries before the birth of Christ.
After an hour or two of driving in circles, furious at my own ineptitude, I surrendered hope of making it back to Los Angeles that day and pulled in at a motel in the small town of Mojave. In a sombre hallway, following a few introductory remarks about the weather, Kimberly offered me a choice of a deluxe room overlooking the swimming pool or a cheaper, regular room over the car park, adding that I might prefer the latter – on account of the train.
There was no time for elaboration before, with melodramatic suddenness, a roar presently engulfed the hotel, negating all possibility of speech for the next four minutes. The sound reverberated around the valley, echoing off the cliff faces of the Tehachapi Mountains and making manifest the vastness of the sandy bowl in which the town lay. Mojave was positioned across one of the country’s most congested rail junctions. Freight trains, many of them a hundred cars long, came through day and night bearing chemicals and aggregates, canned fruits and television sets, cattle carcasses and corn flour. The trains were on their way north and east, from the port at Long Beach to depots in Denver and Chicago, and were so heavily loaded that despite being pushed along by as many as eight separate locomotives apiece, rarely achieved speeds of more than fifty kilometres an hour. On cloudy nights, in the canyons between Mojave and Bakersfield, gangs of Mexican thieves often succeeded in jumping onto these ponderous trains and cutting open containers of valuable cargo. Every month, one or two of their number would be found dead on the desert floor, surrounded by bin bags full of running shoes from Vietnam, having lost their way among the rocks and crevasses. Kimberly showed me an account of just such a misadventure which had been published in the local paper. Decidedly unmoved and vengeful in tone, it appeared to be squarely on the side of the shoes.
The experience of the train made it hard to leave. Learning of it was akin to having seduced someone in a bar only to discover, when she stood up to dance or go to the bathroom, that she had only one leg. I secured a key from Kimberly and headed to my room, from which I almost immediately realised I would have to escape until the instant when I felt ready to go to sleep. I headed back downstairs to take advantage of the swimming pool. A teenaged girl was sitting next to it on a sun lounger and cutting her toenails, which ricocheted remarkable distances across a turquoise-coloured concrete floor. Unfortunately, most of the budget for the pool had apparently been squandered on proclaiming – in an enormous illuminated display by the roadside – that it existed, leaving few resources for it actually to do so. It was the minimum size to qualify as a pool before it would have to be recategorised as a bath.
I went back to the car for a drive around Mojave. However, like many small towns in the American west, it seemed not to have a centre where citizens could gather for fellowship, javelin contests and philosophical debate, as they had done, according to most historical accounts, in Athens in the age of Pericles. There was not even a Wal-Mart. Judging by the number of signs devoted to it, the main attraction was the airport, which ran diagonally across the town and comprised a few huts, a hangar, two Cessnas and a landing strip. In the pale late-afternoon sky, an ultralight aircraft was advancing slowly over the valley, making no discernible progress. But as I continued around the airfield, a more arresting spectacle came into view: on the horizon at the far end of the runway, the entire aeronautical population of a sizeable international airport appeared to have touched down and been parked in close formation, wing tip to wing tip, as if a calamity I had not yet heard about had prompted a mass migration by aircraft from every continent to this particular corner of southern California. There were representatives from the Netherlands, Australia, South Korea, Zimbabwe and Switzerland; there were short-haul Airbuses and giant 747s. Adding to the eeriness of the scene, the planes had none of their usual supporting equipment – no jetties, buses, baggage carts or refuelling trucks. They sat unattended in the desert shrub, their passengers seemingly still waiting inside for the doors to be opened.
Only when I got nearer to them did I apprehend that each of the planes had suffered a particular injury. Several were missing their noses; others had their intakes and sensor probes wrapped in silver foil; a few had lost their undercarriages and were being held up off the ground by packing crates. An Air India 737 had been sliced in half and dug into the sand, so that its cockpit pointed up towards the sky, with no sign of its rear fuselage.
The aircraft were cordoned off by a barbed-wire fence, to one side of which was a rudimentary single-storey administrative building. Hoping to secure permission to take a closer look, I pushed open a corrugated steel door and found myself in the middle of an office. The occupant was squatting beneath his desk, dealing with a printer problem which had sunk him into the sort of cataclysmically sour mood that typically accompanies such a predicament. ‘No,’ he shouted at me, without even raising his head. I explained that I had been driving by the airfield and had been captivated by the peculiar and desolate beauty of the gigantic machines which lay abandoned, and slowly decomposing, in the desert.
‘Fuck off, we don’t give tours,’ he responded decisively.
Certain that his logic would benefit from being exposed to the deeper wellspring of my curiosity, I proceeded to deliver a soliloquy, a polished but approximate version of which it seems unfair to deprive the reader:
‘My desire further to investigate these semi-ruined objects, though personal in nature, nevertheless fits into a long Western tradition of preoccupation with the remnants of collapsing civilisations, which can be traced at least as far back as the eighteenth century. It was then that large numbers of ruin-gazers, Goethe among them, travelled to the Italian peninsula to admire the remains of ancient Rome, often by moonlight, deriving solace from the sight of once-grand palaces and theatres now covered in weeds and sheltering wolves and wild dogs. The Germans, always a proficient people in the coining of compound words, invented the term Ruinenlust to describe this new passion. It seems, in fact, that the more advanced a society is, the greater will be its interest in ruined things, for it will see in them a redemptively sobering reminder of the fragility of its own achievements. Ruins pose a direct challenge to our concern with power and rank, with bustle and fame. They puncture the inflated folly of our exhaustive and frenetic pursuit of wealth. It stands to reason, therefore, that a visitor to the United States, this most technologically developed of all modern societies, should take a particular interest in the flip side of the nation’s progress. The disintegrating Continental Airlines 747 visible outside of your window seems the equivalent, for myself, of what the Colosseum in Rome must have been for the young Edward Gibbon’.
There was a silence as my companion took in the eloquence, cultural range and sheer profundity of what I had just said. The buzz of the ultralight could still be heard high overhead. But the man was evidently disinclined by nature to pay extravagant compliments, for when he finally spoke, it was to say ‘Fuck off’ again with a resolve which his previous riposte had perhaps lacked – to which sentiment he then added, lest there remain any ambiguity, ‘Get the hell out of here before I shoot you in the ass’.
Fortunately, the man was not as unreasonable as this might have implied. He had a fine understanding of the value of money and a few twenty-dollar bills later, we had agreed that I would be free to wander around the site until he closed it at nightfall, though I would first have to sign a lengthy legal document guaranteeing that I (or in the event of my death, my relatives) would never attempt to sue him or his heirs for any injuries that I might incur due to the many dangers outside, which included but were not limited to razor-sharp pieces of severed aircraft wings, unstable fuselages and the triangular-headed Mojave rattlesnakes who made their homes amidst the planes’ galleys, engines and seats. My mentor saw me off with a surprisingly gentle word of warning about the desert tortoises who also roamed amongst the wreckage. Many were over a hundred years old, he said – putting them well into their twenties or thirties by the time the Spirit of Saint Louis conquered the Atlantic – but were wary of strangers and apt to release their bladders if surprised, thereby losing their whole season’s water supply, on which their survival depended.
Out on the airfield, the damage was greater than I had imagined. While a few of the planes were still whole, most had already been so extensively gutted and filleted for spare parts that only their rib cages were left intact. The ground was strewn with undercarriages and engines, seats and cargo boxes, ailerons and elevators. Machines which had spent the better part of their working lives being cosseted by engineers and highly trained mechanics had in death been hacked at with chain saws and diggers.
It was surprisingly noisy too. Food-trolley doors, seat belts and upended toilet seats clacked in the wind, making the place sound like a marina in a storm. Many of the planes wore liveries testifying to corporate hubris: Midway, Braniff, Novair, African Air Express, TWA, Swissair. Most had started out in the fleets of well-funded flag carriers and then over time had slipped down the rungs of the aviation ladder until, in their final employment, they were reduced to doing midnight cargo runs from Miami to San Juan and back or shuttling between Addis Ababa and Harare, their once-immaculate first-class seats patched up with silver duct tape.
One Somali Airlines 707 was lying on its side, with only one wing still attached. Qantas had bought the machine in 1966 and flown it between London and Sydney for eight years before selling it to Malaysian Airlines. In Kuala Lumpur, the new owners had exchanged the kangaroo painted on its tail for a stylised bird and removed the first-class compartment. After completing a decade’s worth of trips to Hong Kong, the plane – by now badly stained around the rear of its fuselage – had been passed on to the Somalis. Limping aloft with the help of unauthorised spare parts, the Boeing had ferried soldiers, smugglers, aid workers and tourists between Mogadishu, Johannesburg and Frankfurt. Then had come an accident with a van at Mogadishu airport, a bullet wound in the tail during a battle with insurgents and an emergency landing in Nairobi with one of the engines on fire. After the airline went broke and its CEO was shot dead in a bungled robbery, an agreement was reached to ship the frail machine to its last resting place.
It was striking to see how quickly the planes had aged: though the oldest of these examples had not yet been off the production line for half a century, they seemed more antique than a Greek temple. Inside the cabins were remnants of now-obsolete technologies: outsize Bakelite phones, coils of fat electric cables, bulky boxes on the ceilings where film projectors had once been slotted. The cockpits had seats for flight engineers, whose jobs were presently being done by computers the size of hardcover books. Some aircraft still sported their Pratt & Whitney JT3D engines, the proud workhorses of the 1970s, which had generated a then-remarkable 17,500 pounds of thrust, little guessing that a few decades later their successors would, with a fraction of the fuel or noise output, be capable of producing five times that.
What makes the prospect of death distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any possible faith in the permanence of our labours. Our ancestors could believe that their achievements had a chance of bearing up against the flow of events. We know time to be a hurricane. Our buildings, our sense of style, our ideas, all of these will soon enough be anachronisms, and the machines in which we now take inordinate pride will seem no less bathetic than Yorick’s skull.
Identifying a TWA plane which had lost both its cockpit and its wheels, I climbed up into the fuselage and arranged myself in seat 1C, a royal-blue executive chair with a large stain in the middle of its lower cushion. It was seven in the evening but still bright and agreeably warm. I wanted to press the call button and order a Coke from the stewardess, who was perhaps now dead. I noticed that a few rows behind me, the emergency oxygen masks had dropped down from the overhead compartment. They had done so not in the gruesome accident one associates them with, when the engines are on fire and the emergency slide lies tumescent around the main door, the ladies having grown too troubled to remember to remove their high-heeled shoes, but simply through the slow erosion of their spring catches. Perhaps we are always more likely to die like this, without particular drama, without firemen in smoke hoods and foam on the runway, without the comfort of a collective accident and the sympathy of newscasters, but through an insipidly slow process of disintegration, the masks only gradually wearing loose and swinging idly in the desert wind, witnessed by rattlesnakes and shy and incontinent desert tortoises.
My thoughts turned to the people who had built and animated these machines, the employees who had exchanged business cards at Le Bourget at the Paris air show of 1968, who had made the Bakelite intercom phones in Trenton, New Jersey, followed the expansion of Eastern Airlines and, in a factory near Calgary, fashioned the blankets which were now disappearing into the Mojave dust. I thought, too, of the captain, and of the flirtatious remarks he might have exchanged with the stewardess who brought his dinner in to him on a tin-foil-covered tray during a trip down to the Caribbean in 1971, the same year Idi Amin came to power and John Newcombe won his third Wimbledon. I imagined his gold braided cap and his aviator glasses, his tanned, bristly arms, his descent towards the tarmac at Kingston and his purple and magenta room overlooking the pool of the newly opened Sunseeker Club near the airport.
How improbable the thought of his own death would have seemed to him, how contrary to his aerobic body and acute mind. There would have been few reminders or signs that there were a finite number of times that his knees would comfortably bend to pick up a suitcase, that eventually even his most basic thoughts would become too arduous for him to connect, that he was working his way through the ten thousand days still allocated to him and that the small daily jolts of anxiety he experienced when dealing with congestion at O’Hare or bad weather over the Gulf of Mexico would one morning reach critical mass in the form of a sudden and definitive tightening in the chest in a driveway in a Phoenix suburb.
Death is hard to keep in mind when there is work to be done: it seems not so much taboo as unlikely. Work does not by its nature permit us to do anything other than take it too seriously. It must destroy our sense of perspective, and we should be grateful to it for precisely that reason, for allowing us to mingle ourselves promiscuously with events, for letting us wear thoughts of our own death and the destruction of our enterprises with beautiful lightness, as mere intellectual propositions, while we travel to Paris to sell engine oil. We function on the basis of a necessary myopia. Therein is the sheer energy of existence, a blind will no less impressive than that which we find in a moth arduously crossing a window ledge, stepping around a dollop of paint left by a too-hasty brush, refusing to contemplate the broader scheme in which he will be dead by nightfall.
The arguments for our triviality and vulnerability are too obvious, too well known and too tedious to rehearse. What is interesting is that we may take it upon ourselves to approach tasks with utter determination and gravity even when their wider non-sense is clear. The impulse to exaggerate the significance of what we are doing, far from being an intellectual error, is really life itself coursing through us. Good health encourages us to identify with all human experiences in all lands, to sigh at a murder in a faraway country, to hope for economic growth and technological progress far beyond the limits of our own lifespan, forgetting that we are never more than a few rogue cells away from the end.
To see ourselves as the centre of the universe and the present time as the summit of history, to view our upcoming meetings as being of overwhelming significance, to neglect the lessons of cemeteries, to read only sparingly, to feel the pressure of deadlines, to snap at colleagues, to make our way through conference agendas marked ‘11:00 a.m. to 11:15 a.m.: coffee break’, to behave heedlessly and greedily and then to combust in battle – maybe all of this, in the end, is working wisdom. It is paying death too much respect to prepare for it with sage prescriptions. Let it surprise us while we are shipping wood pulp across the Baltic Sea, removing the heads of tuna, developing a nauseating variety of biscuit, advising a client on a change of career, firing a satellite with which to beguile a generation of Japanese schoolgirls, painting an oak tree in a field, laying an electricity line, doing the accounts, inventing a deodorant dispenser or making an extended-strength coiled tube for an airliner. Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.
If we could witness the eventual fate of every one of our projects, we would have no choice but to succumb to immediate paralysis. Would anyone who watched the departure of Xerxes’ army on its way to conquer the Greeks, or Taj Chan Ahk giving orders for the construction of the golden temples of Cancuén, or the British colonial administrators inaugurating the Indian postal system, have had it in their hearts to fill their passionate actors in on the eventual fate of their efforts?
Our work will at least have distracted us, it will have provided a perfect bubble in which to invest our hopes for perfection, it will have focused our immeasurable anxieties on a few relatively small-scale and achievable goals, it will have given us a sense of mastery, it will have made us respectably tired, it will have put food on the table. It will have kept us out of greater trouble.