A Week at the Airport by Alain de Botton Page A

noblemen who had blithely commissioned delicate frescoes in honour of spring.
    Besides, and more prosaically, technological changes seemed to be drawing a curtain on a long and blessed interlude in which writers had been able to survive by selling their works to a wider public, threatening a renewed condition of anxious dependence on the largesse of individual sponsors. Contemplating what it might mean to be employed by an airport, I looked with plaintiveoptimism to the example of the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who had thought nothing of writing his books while in the pay of the Earls of Devonshire, routinely placing florid declarations to them in his treatises and even accepting their gift of a small bedroom next to the vestibule of their home in Derbyshire, Hardwick Hall. ‘I humbly offer my book to your Lordship,’ England’s subtlest political theorist had written to the swaggering William Devonshire on presenting him with
De Cive
in 1642. ‘May God of Heaven crown you with many days in your earthly station, and many more in heavenly Jerusalem.’
    In contrast, my own patron, Colin Matthews, the chief executive of BAA, the owner of Heathrow, was the most undemanding of employers. He made no requests whatever of me, not for a dedication, or even a modest reference to his prospects in the next world. His staff went so far as to give me explicit permission to be rude about the airport’s activities. In such lack of constraints, I felt myself to be benefiting from a tradition wherein the wealthy merchant enters into a relationship with an artist fully prepared for him to behave like an outlaw; he does not expect good manners, he knows and is half delighted by the idea that the favoured baboon will smash his crockery. In such tolerance lies the ultimate proof of his power.
    3 In any event, my new employer was legitimately proud of his terminal and understandably keen to find ways to sing of its beauty. The undulating glass and steel structure was the largest building in the land, forty metres tall and 400 long, the size of four football pitches, and yet the whole conveyed a sense of continuous lightness and ease, like an intelligent mind engaging effortlessly with complexity. The blinking of its ruby lights could be seen at dusk from Windsor Castle, the terminal’s forms giving shape to the promises of modernity.
    Standing before costly objects of technological beauty, we may be tempted to reject the possibility of awe, for fear that we could grow stupid through admiration. We may feel at risk of becoming overimpressed by architecture and engineering, of being dumbstruck by the Bombardier trains that progressdriverlessly between satellites or by the General Electric GE90 engines that hang lightly off the composite wings of a Boeing 777 bound for Seoul.
    And yet to refuse to be awed at all might in the end be merely another kind of foolishness. In a world full of chaos and irregularity, the terminal seemed a worthy and intriguing refuge of elegance and logic. It was the imaginative centre of contemporary culture. Had one been asked to take a Martian to visit a single place that neatly captures the gamut of themes running through our civilisation – from our faith in technology to our destruction of nature, from our interconnectedness to our romanticising of travel – then it would have to be to the departures and arrivals halls that one would head. I ran out of reasons not to accept the airport’s unusual offer to spend a little more time on its premises.

1 I arrived at the airport on a train from central London early on a Sunday evening, a small roller case in hand and no further destination for the week. I had been billeted at the Terminal 5 outpost of the Sofitel hotel chain, which, while not directly under the ownership of the airport, was situated only a few metres away from it, umbilically connected to the mothership by a sequence of covered walkways and a common architectural language