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single category, the broad selections on offerat WH Smith spoke to the diversity of individuals’ motives for reading. If there was a conclusion to be drawn from the number of bloodstained covers, however, it was that there was a powerful desire, in a wide cross-section of airline passengers, to be terrified. High above the earth, they were looking to panic about being murdered, and thereby to forget their more mundane fears about the success of a conference in Salzburg or the challenges of having sex for the first time with a new partner in Antigua.

    I had a chat with a manager named Manishankar, who had been working at the shop since the terminal first opened. I explained – with the excessive exposition of a man spending a lonely week at the airport – that I was looking for the sort of books in which a genial voice expresses emotions that the reader has long felt but never before really understood; those that convey the secret, everyday things that society at large prefers to leave unsaid; those that make one feel somehow less alone and strange.
    Manishankar wondered if I might like a magazine instead. There was no shortage, including several with feature articles on how to look good after forty – advice of course predicatedon the assumption that one’s appearance had been pleasing at thirty-nine (the writer’s age).
    Nearby, another bookcase held an assortment of classic novels, which had been imaginatively arranged, not by author or title, but according to the country in which their narratives were set. Milan Kundera was being suggested as a guide to Prague, and Raymond Carver depended upon to reveal the hidden character of the small towns between Los Angeles and Santa Fe. Oscar Wilde once remarked that there had been less fog in London before James Whistler started to paint, and one wondered if the silence and sadness of isolated towns in the American West had not been similarly less apparent before Carver began to write.

    Every skilful writer foregrounds notable aspects of experience, details that might otherwise be lost in the mass of data that continuously bathes our senses – and in so doing prompts us to find and savour these in the world around us. Works of literature could be seen, in this context, as immensely subtle instruments by means of which travellers setting out from Heathrow might be urged to pay more careful attention to such things as the conformity and corruption of Colognesociety (Heinrich Böll), the quiet eroticism of provincial Italy (Italo Svevo) or the melancholy of Tokyo’s subways (Kenzaburō Ōe).
    3 It was only after several days of frequenting the shops that I started to understand what those who objected to the dominance of consumerism at the airport might have been complaining about. The issue seemed to centre on an incongruity between shopping and flying, connected in some sense to the desire to maintain dignity in the face of death.

    Despite the many achievements of aeronautical engineers over the last few decades, the period before boarding an aircraft is still statistically more likely to be the prelude to a catastrophe than a quiet day in front of the television at home. It therefore tends to raise questions about how we might best spend the last moments before our disintegration, in what frame of mind we might wish to fall back down to earth – and the extent to which we would like to meet eternity surrounded by an array of duty-free bags.
    Those who attacked the presence of the shops might in essence have been nudging us to prepare ourselves for the end. At the Blink beauty bar, I felt anew the relevance of the traditional religious call to seriousness voiced in Bach’s Cantata 106:

    Bestelle dein Haus
,
Denn du wirst Sterben
,
Und nicht lebendig bleiben
.
    Set thy house in order,
For thou shalt die,
And not remain alive.
    Despite its seeming mundanity, the ritual of flying remains indelibly linked, even in secular times, to the momentous themes of existence – and