Into the Air Again

Once again, in the air. For most of the past several weekends I have traveled someplace by plane. I have renewed my membership in the Silver Elite cadre. I get to enter the plane right after the first class passengers and right before everyone else. I feel completely ungrounded. And there is one more trip yet to make—New York for Thanksgiving.

I have been on this flight before; I recognize the flight attendants. I suppose it never crossed my mind that even flight attendancy has a routine all its own, and that most mornings, these workers arise and head to the office not unlike the rest of us. Their offices tend to move at 500 miles per hour and move through space miles above the ground, but the office veritably (veritably: able of truth) remains the same day-to-day. And the responsibilities hardly vary: admit paying passengers, organize the cabin, deliver instructions, serve beverages, clean-up, and organize the debarking. And then on to the next city, or the same city, and the same routine until tomorrow, when it all begins again. It is our modern day, and today I ascribe much of the nightmare to Frederick Taylor and scientific management, the system which seems to have colonized the world, not unlike those pods in Invasions of the Body Snatchers. Everybody wonders about efficiency, worries about efficiency, as if the greatest sin in our time is to be unproductive, to engage in a frivolous, non-utilitarian act. To waste time. As if time isn’t mine to do with it what I would. As if there is some accounting system which will tally and evaluate my use of time

I am guilty myself of this neurosis. I rationalize by saying that I am being responsible; but I wonder sometimes if this busy-ness isn’t all an attempt to avoid myself. Thoreau quips that the man who exits the post office with the greatest number of letters has almost certainly not heard from himself in a long while.I often do forget the sound of my own voice. I suffer a fear of non-productiveness, and I surround myself with books and papers and music devices and journals. I hide behind my efforts. I am never far from an activity, but always on the verge of neurotic terror of idleness. Too often I leave the post office with too many letters. Certainly I accumulate too many catalogs.