Flights

The narrator describes her philosophy of time as similar to islands: “archipelagos of order in an ocean of chaos” (53). She rejects the standard view of time as linear and progressive. Rather, the narrator believes in gathering a “mean” time based on an individual’s relation to other time zones, locations, and forms of transportation.

Airports act as small cities for the narrator. They often include everything a person needs to live, from food to entertainment. The narrator reasserts her belief in the sanctity of movement from the perspective of her time in airports: “It is widely known, after all, that real life takes place in movement” (55). The narrator introduces the “Three Basic Travel Questions”: asking another person where they are from, where they are coming in from, and where they are going.

The narrator discusses her distaste for trains in one fragmentary section. The travelers who choose trains over airplanes are “cowards” whose end goal is always to return to the place they started out from. These travelers who vacation once a year seek a temporary escape from their lives without having to leave everything behind, as the narrator herself prefers.

While in the Stockholm airport, the narrator meets a woman named Aleksandra when both agree to stay a night in the airport hotel after their flight is overbooked.