Free A Week at the Airport by Alain de Botton

from the Netherlands, had made its reputation in the mail-order and parcel-distribution sectors and was now the world leader in suitcase logistics. Seventeen kilometres’ worth of conveyor belts ran under the terminal, where they were capable of processing some twelve thousand pieces ofluggage an hour. One hundred and forty computers scanned tags, determined where individual bags were going and checked them for explosives along the way. The machines treated the suitcases with a level of care that few humans would have shown them: when the bags had to wait in transit, robots would carry them gently over to a dormitory and lay them down on yellow mattresses, where – like their owners in the lounges above – they would loll until their flights were ready to receive them. By the time they were lifted off the belt, many suitcases were likely to have had more interesting travels than their owners.

    Nevertheless, in the end, there was something irremediably melancholic about the business of being reunited with one’s luggage. After hours in the air free of encumbrance, spurred on to formulate hopeful plans for the future by the views of coasts and forests below, passengers were reminded, on standing at the carousel, of all that was material and burdensome in existence. There were some elemental dualities at work in the contrasting realms of the baggage-reclaim hall and the aeroplane – dichotomies of matter and spirit, heaviness and lightness, body and soul – with the negative halves of the equations all linked to the stream of almost identical black Samsonite cases thatrolled ceaselessly along the tunnels and belts of Vanderlande’s exquisite conveyor apparatus.
    Around the carousel, as in a Roman traffic jam, trolleys grimly refused to cede so much as a centimetre to one another. Although each suitcase was a repository of dense and likely fascinating individuality – this one perhaps containing a lime-coloured bikini and an unread copy of
Civilization and Its Discontents
, that one a dressing gown stolen from a Chicago hotel and a packet of Roche antidepressants – this was not the place to start thinking about anyone else.
    5 Yet the baggage area was only a prelude to the airport’s emotional climax. There is no one, however lonely or isolated, however pessimistic about the human race, however preoccupied with the payroll, who does not in the end expect that someone significant will come to say hello at arrivals.
    Even if our loved ones have assured us that they will be busy at work, even if they told us they hated us for going travelling in the first place, even if they left us last June or died twelve and a half years ago, it is impossible not to experience a shiver of a sense that they may have come along anyway, just to surprise us and make us feel special (as someone must have done for uswhen we were small, if only occasionally, or we would never have had the strength to make it this far).
    It is therefore hard to know just what expression we should mould our faces into as we advance towards the reception zone. It might be foolhardy to relinquish the solemn and guarded demeneaour we usually adopt while wandering through the anonymous spaces of the world, but at the same time, it seems only right that we should leave open at least the suggestion of a smile. We may settle on the sort of cheerful but equivocal look commonly worn by people listening out for punchlines to jokes narrated by their bosses.
    So what dignity must we possess not to show any hesitation when it becomes clear, in the course of a twelve-second scan of the line, that we are indeed alone on the planet, with nowhere to head to other than a long queue at the ticket machine for the Heathrow Express. What maturity not to mind that only two metres from us, a casually dressed young man perhaps employed in the lifeguard industry has been met with a paroxysm of joy by a sincere and thoughtful-looking young woman with whose mouth he is now involved. And