COMMENTARY: Fix the Airport, Lose the Mystery

c. 2000 Religion News Service (Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of “My Brother Joseph,” published by St. Martin’s Press.) (UNDATED) There is a move under way to make airports into destinations in themselves, according to The […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of “My Brother Joseph,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

(UNDATED) There is a move under way to make airports into destinations in themselves, according to The Practical Traveler in The New York Times, with “innovations that make time there more bearable.”


These are not the usual souvenir and magazine stands that accent the fact that you are traveling. The make-overs are designed to make you forget that you are traveling at all.

They include gourmet restaurants, gyms with sauna, steam, and swimming pools, a facility called “Kids on The Fly,” the equivalent of a day care center, complete with Legos and crayons, and, “offices by the minute” termed Laptop Lane in which you can “gather scattered thoughts and e-mail messages.”

In short, all the discomforts of home and office. Thomas Wolfe is famous for writing “You can’t go home again.” These alarming developments de-construct that into “You can’t leave home at all.” Think of that the next time somebody’s beeper or cell phone goes off at the theater.

These so-called improvements are well-intentioned in the same way the planned burn of the dry forest near Los Alamos was. The fire robbed thousands of people of their homes and of the large and small mysteries that breathed and whispered from their pictures and jewelry, from their tables and chairs, from the settings of their lives.

The transformation of airports into places indistinguishable from the places you have been and the places you are going obliterates the mysteries of travel and separation that are celebrated within them every day.

In his short story, “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin,” John Cheever’s narrator is waiting for a train in Indianapolis. “The station,” he tells us, “is proportioned like a cathedral and lit by a rose window _ is … of that genre of architecture that means to express the mystery and drama of travel and separation. The colors of the rose windows, limpid as a kaleidoscope, dyed the marble walls and the waiting passengers. …”

Train stations unconsciously acknowledged that something deeper than passing time or doing business occurred within their walls. They resembled churches right down to their pewlike benches because they were settings for the liturgy of life itself. Their soaring spaces and the shafts of pastel light falling on their marble floors did not distract the traveler but instead provided a sacramental frame for the comings and goings, and all the waiting and expectation, too, that are aspects of the mystery of being alive.


That is why railroad stations are often the setting for stories capturing the excitement and heartbreak of impossible love. Why is it we speak, as we do of few other activities, of the “romance of railroading?” Why did Monet so often paint, and why do we never tire of gazing at, the railway stations of Paris unless, with their light and shadow and curls of steam against the sky, they speak to the pilgrim soul in all of us about the spiritual nature of making or returning from a journey?

Railroad stations did not disguise their purpose but boldly immersed us in the mystery of being, as Christians are reminded, “in via,” on the way, ever setting out to taste the novelty of some place new and to feel the longing for everything familiar.

Railroad stations did not anesthetize us to the mystery of separation that is as central to our growth as it is painful to endure. In Norman Rockwell’s remembered America, it is at railroad stations that people leave home for the first time, to go to war or to go to college. It is to the same railroad stations that, changed utterly by their travel, they return. Railroad stations displayed the giant trains growling like dragons, reminding us that something mythical takes place whenever we travel. They did not obscure but gave housing to the sacred moments of our lives.

Airports hold precious little of that mystery in the angled metal of their chrome sheds and bland concourses. Now, in the name of progress, they are going to extinguish any flickering of the mystery that inheres in every journey undertaken. Such special effects artists cannot see that these great places where people meet and say goodbye, embrace, sometimes in tears and sometimes in smiles, are sacred spaces in which all the important transactions of the soul and heart take place.

The modernizers are driving moneychangers back into the temple. They want to spare us the possibility of experiencing our own lives, of feeling their meaning as travel forces us to contemplate what we value and believe and how we are ransomed from mortality by love.

Sounds American, but it doesn’t sound like progress to me.

DEA END KENNEDY

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