Are you a fan? I was just recently lamenting over the fact that I no longer live in a rural part of the country. Life is noisy in the city, even in the nearby suburbs. It is hard to get at total peace. In fact, I have been known to be cantankerous about our lack of agrarian life today. Damn you Descartes. I digress.
Really, nothing is more iconic of modern man as the airport terminal. A mass of humanity, pushed together, set on a trajectory of dissimilar destination, impersonally identified together in a shared misery of waiting for our birth on a trip that is unnatural to the very nature of ourselves. I think Heidegger made this critique about aviation, and since he never flew, he never had the opportunity to be in the terminal, waiting, peering, glaring, and all the other things we do there.
In a way, the airport terminal is like the waiting room for hell. Okay, so that is over the top, but just go with the analogy for a second. A throng of humanity, sharing in a common misery, yet completely disjointed from each other. Those who understand its reality are those who you find huddled in the corner in fear, throwing down a bottle of dramamine or buying the early hard drink. For the others, for the happy bunch that do not know what is before them, they have tricked their mind in the most unnatural way. Predetermined and focused to gain their end, they ignore the very means that so places their humanity in the throes of utter fragility.
So, as I sit here in type on this terminal I learn in my very typing that I am a part of the latter. In an even more repulsive way, I have ignored my fellow man, suffering with me, to instead turn and write to an audience that I am uncertain exists. Oh, Modern Man that I am.
