I climb into the seat on the plane. We barrel down the runway. The plane ascends – taking off to an adventure. The city shrinks to a map. The wings tilt back down and we enter a space beyond the clouds. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
You\u2019ll remember from reading my previous adventures: China, the UK, Indonesia, that this is an exercise in literary flourish and reflection. A snapshot of some feelings from the day. Do remember the trees in Indonesia strangling the buildings and reaching up to the rain clouds, or the dancing astronomers at Greenwich Observatory. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway searches for the dream of Gatsby. An almost unattainable legend – something everyone describes but seems has not truly found. Ultimately Gatsby chases Daisy for five years but she doesn\u2019t live up to his imagination. The green light at the far side of the bay seems amazing from a distance, but up close it is small and unremarkable. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In The Art of Travel<\/em> Alain De Botton says travel brochures (and today Instagram) feed our human ability to create fantasy worlds for ourselves. That in this we crop and filter out the unpleasant contextual details to better frame our selective imagination. That we create an experience of beauty, forgetting that physical reality is never so cleanly filtered. This expectation leaves out two unavoidable variables, our emotional states and our physical bodies. On arriving we battle jet lag, heat exhaustion, bad digestion or aching feet. The mind carries its own anxieties, relationship friction with the new environment, and self-consciousness. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Consider Duc des Esseintes, who after reading Dickens, plans a trip to London. Whilst waiting on a Paris train station, he has a vision of rain, tea and atmosphere that leads him to conclude the reality could only disappoint him. So he cancels the trip and goes home. Alain says we fail to recognise that imagination compresses time, and strips away the mundane friction that accompanies real life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For the whole of the trip, the plane is in a sense still in the air, until we return to land in Sydney. The holiday experience as a heady feeling of a constructed world. Unlike Des Esseintes, I\u2019m staying on the plane and will endure the aching feet and jet lag because I expect something. For a memorable family trip. Perhaps to catch some glimpse of the Age of Discovery, to see why these great nations of Portugal and Spain became great trading empires, but then gave it all away. Perhaps to just take this world as it is, and celebrate being in the moment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n When we arrive in Portugal the plane will still be in the air. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I climb into the seat on the plane. We barrel down the runway. The plane ascends – taking off to an adventure. The city shrinks to a map. The wings tilt back down and we enter a space beyond the … Continue reading