Some Scattered Thoughts on Proust and Planes

For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say "I'm going to sleep." And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me;

(Marcel Proust, Swann's Way)

Think of your own experiences in transit, drifting in and out of sleep. Perhaps your seat was never comfortable enough for true rest -so you doze: all the better. Sleep and conciousness intermingle in the potion of the mind, and reality begins to smile its wide smile. Who truly remembers well the events of a twenty hour flight (like mine), What becomes of memory in these places? The pretty waitress's smile grows a fang in your eye and the fragrance of the slowly warming fruit (ever warmer) paints an orchard tween your luminous eyes [half shut -whole shut] spying the dim lit screen -how many hours have past?

To be IN TRANSIT can be a horrible thing. To be nowhere (nowhen as well) is unbearable. Is that why my brain slips me down to Marsailles? Bruges? Ryusshu?

Heisenberg told me that we're all nowhere and that's the only way to be somewhere but I'm

Awake now and none of that seems very silly.

The time is 336 in New York and Midnight in Vancouver.

Few writers can make me envy the swirling channel of near sleep -that bare conciousness which opens the mind to be inhabited by a thousand bright beasts, stage within stage on which tragedy and farce fall upon the other, always, like blind brothers at reunion -no no, few writers conjour these intoxicating half-knowns half as well, few manifest those shadowy half-lits which fill the between-places, none so best as Proust.

I say copies of Proust's Swann's Way should be kept on all long distance flights. I've no doubt that someone will find it more useful than a catalog of Duty-Free perfumes. A joy in itself, but it's greatest gift might simply be to reveal one of the most interesting benefits of flight: an upheaval of the mind.

Where do I begin to search for my lost time? Did I leave it in Eastern? Pacific? Maybe it escaped to CEST. I imagine a swirling pool of time below our static humming cabin. When will we arrive? Perhaps we already have? On a high speed jet it would be possible for me to wake up before I fell asleep. When reading Proust, we might ask how different that is from any other twilight when the world dims.