different perspectives of an airport

Douglas Adam’s had this to say about airports… anyone who’s been a frequent flier might relate to this brilliant description immediately!

“It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression “as pretty as an airport”. Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk, and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.

They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal shapes and nerve jangling colours, to make effortless the business of separating the traveller for ever from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveller with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or the current position of Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the departure gates, presumably on the assumption that they are not”

~ Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea Time Of The Soul

On the other hand, there’s a rather different perspective given to it in the movie the Terminal (Tom Hanks) where the drab and boring airport terminal literally comes to life in the story. I’d particularly liked this movie as I’d watched it all alone when I was living in Germany. In general its a beautiful movie, but considering my somewhat solitudinous circumstances, at some point I was really moved when one of the characters announces “I AM GOING HOME!” 🙂

Even R.K. Narayan in an interview had this to say about airports…

Did he have any ritual connected with his writing, I asked? Anything that got the creative juices flowing? “No, no,” he laughed, “I can write anywhere, any time. In fact, I find I do some of my best writing in airport departure lounges. There’s so much happening around you; all kinds of people doing all kinds of things; children running around, making a noise. I think it’s wonderful.”

Rediff: R.K. Narayan Interview

This perspective seems to be shared and rather eloquently described in this beautiful post by say la vee: terminal.