AIRPLANE

Alex sits in the plane, imagining himself from the perspective of a bored child sitting in a car, looking up. They should swap; this plane is designed for the very young and the very bored. All Alex is required to do for the next six and a half hours is eat and watch television and fall asleep for a while. All this is so earnestly wanted for him, OF him. No one has desired his comfort and sleept this badly since he was a baby.

Everything possible is done to make him feel that nothing momentous, like flight, is occurring. At no point does anyone suggest that he and three hunded other strangers of unknown mental health status are trapped in a four-hundred-ton aircraft flying thrity thorusand feet up in the air relying on equatons of energy and velocity that no one aboard could sketch out in even their most basic form. Everything in this plane is an interface, like the windows on his computer. Nothing in this plane has anything to do with flying, just as his desktop doesn’t have anything to do with the processing of information. Pretty, pretty pictures.

Zadie Smith: The Autograph Man, p 184

12. Oktober 2006 16:03 Uhr. Kategorie Buch. Eine Antwort.