Free A Week at the Airport by Alain de Botton Page A

what a commitment to reality it will take for us not to wish that we might, just for a time, be not our own tiresome selves but rather Gavin, flying in from Los Angeles after a gap year in Fiji and Australia, with whose devoted parents, exhilarated aunt, delighted sister, two girl friends and a helium balloon we might therefore repair to a house on the southern outskirts of Birmingham.

    At arrivals, there were forms of welcome of which princes would have been jealous, and which would have rendered inadequate the celebrations laid on at Venice’s quaysides for the explorers of the Eastern silk routes. Individuals without official status or distinguishing traits, passengers who had sat unobtrusively for twenty-two hours near the emergency exits, now set aside their bashfulness and revealed themselves as the intended targets of flags, banners, streamers and irregularly formed home-baked chocolate biscuits – while, behind them, the chiefs of large corporations prepared for glacial limousine rides to the marble-and-orchid-bedecked lobbies of their luxury hotels.
    The prevalence of divorce in modern society guaranteed an unceasing supply of airport reunions between parents and children. In this context, there was no longer any point in pretending to be sober or stoic: it was time to squeeze a pair of frail and yet plump shoulders very tightly and founder into tears. We may spend the better part of our professional lives projectingstrength and toughness, but we are all in the end creatures of appalling fragility and vulnerability. Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few who hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognise by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without. There were men pacing impatiently and blankly who had looked forward to this moment for half a year and could not restrain themselves any further at the sight of a small boy endowed with their own grey-green eyes and their mother’s cheeks, emerging from behind the stainless-steel gate, holding the hand of an airport operative.

    At such moments, it felt almost as if death itself had been averted – and yet there was also a sense, lending the occasion more poignancy still, that it could not go on being cheated for ever. Perhaps this was a way of practising for mortality. Some day, many years from now, the adult child would say goodbye to his father before going on a routine business trip, and the reprieve would abruptly run out. There would be a telephone call in the middle of the night to a room on the twentieth floor of a Melbourne hotel, bringing the news that the parent had suffereda catastrophic seizure on the other side of the world and that there was nothing more the doctors could do for him – and from that day forward, for the now-grown-up boy, the line in arrivals would always be missing one face in particular.
    6 Not all meetings were so emotional. One might have come from Shanghai to join Malcolm and Mike for a drive down to Bournemouth to learn English for the summer: a two-month sojourn in a bed and breakfast near the pier, with regular lessons from a tutor who would teach her class how to say ‘ought’ and help them master business English, a subcategory of the language that would vouchsafe future careers in the semi-conductor and textile industries of the Pearl River delta.

    For his part, Mohammed was waiting for Chris’s flight from San Francisco. The former, originally from Lahore, was at present based in Southall, while the latter, from Portland, Oregon, now lived in Silicon Valley – not that either man would attempt to discover these details about the other. In an otherwise uninhabited universe, how strange that one should so easily be able to sit in silence with another human being in a black Mercedes S-Class sedan. For both driver and passenger, the trip would be counted a success if the other party proved not