Traveling can be stressful nowadays, but traveling by plane, in particular, is a constant contest between haste and hesitation, between the thrill of being hurried and the headache of feeling harried. On the one hand the possibility of it, the relative ease of it, is astounding. You drive 10 or 20 or 30 miles to an airport, you call a limo or a cab, or you take the bus or the subway—all, theoretically, can drop you at the door to a major airport in no time flat.
Unless there's traffic. Or rain. You did think about that, right? Maybe you left an hour early. But even when we arrive at the airport early, we often feel like we have no time. Whenever my ride pulls up outside the doors of the airport, I try to peek through to gauge the size of the crowd and the length of the wait. As fast as the modern world allows us to move, I often can't shake the nervous feeling that it's still moving much faster than I can, that I won't be able to keep up, and the world will pass me by.
Airports have a way of moving quickly and moving slowly at once. Short lines at the check-in counter often transform into logjams at the X-ray checkpoints. Then I reach the moving sidewalks, and step on one without breaking my stride, and my posture tightens up, and the metal floor seems to have a little more give than the actual floor of the concourse. And the stride! The stride is the speed of the modern world, steady and accomplished, making great time, fluid and powerful.
I always seem to walk quickly to get to my gate, and what do I find once I get there but a long wait for my plane to arrive, for its passengers to get off, and then there's the whole "Rows 1-5 first, please," when I have a ticket for Row 26, or "We like to board from the back of the plane," when I have a ticket for Row 5. No one wants to be late, but being early isn't much of a consolation, either.
Getting onto the plane is relatively smooth, though again, the breezy stroll down the jetway forever is juxtaposed by the bottleneck right at the door to the plane. Ten or 15 minutes later, after the passengers have all been seated, there is a coiled restlessness to get under way, and when the plane begins to move, there is a slight sensation of not believing it is really moving. After all, the plane doesn't exactly lunge or surge or hiccup. There's no inertia pushing you out of your seat.
But finally you get some real movement. One of the most satisfying feelings of speed in the modern world is a plane's acceleration down the runway. Engines growl, and the plane shudders, and now you're steadily pushed back into your seat, and the growl gets louder, and you're moving faster and faster.
A half minute after liftoff, the engines make a sound as if they're slowing down, and I always have a quick moment of anxiety, feeling like the plane is no longer suspended under its own power but hanging above the ground by a single line.
In the air, where all of us travel faster than anywhere else in our lives, in the neighborhood of 500 miles an hour, planes feel strangely slow. Even when you fly over a familiar city, and watch it pass underneath in a matter of moments, the sensation is not one of speed as much as one of dreaminess, unreality. Speed is a bodily thing, you start to realize. It's often not enough for the phenomena of the world to be fast. They must feel fast, and they must feel fast in the bones. Only when you catch sight of another jet in the air, angling off on its own vector, a smallish black dart in the sky that your eye tracks and loses and struggles to find again—then you have a sense of speed in the sky.
It makes sense, then, that the sensation of speed returns on the final touchdown, when you're traveling at 150 mph or so. The buildup of speed for takeoff is just that. But the landing makes your whole body jolt, and the speed of the whole endeavor hits you when the plane slows down with a loud whine of the airbrakes, and for those few seconds you're right in the hot seat of the Jet Age, and it's not how far you've come so fast, not the bridging of one side of a country to another, one part of the world to another. It's that shrugging off of speed you feel in your bones.
And then that exhilaration vanishes all at once, and the plane has become like a horse that is just slowly trotting back to its stable. You sit on the tarmac for a few long minutes, then taxi to the gate, and when the "ding" resonates through the plane, and the cabin lights come on, and briefly everyone stands at once, and there's a moment of hurry, but it doesn't last for more than a moment, because getting off a plane is such tedium. For a while nothing seems to be happening in the front of the plane, and then it's empty and there's a surge of movement from the back as the rest of the passengers disembark.
You come off the plane at McCarran, past the Wheel of Fortune slots, onto the brisk people-mover, down an escalator and out to baggage claim. For some, all thoughts of speed, of movement, have evaporated and given way to the serene feeling of having safely arrived. For others there is plenty of anxiety left, negotiating the mob scene of the baggage carousels, waiting for the bags to start rolling off the conveyers, waiting for your bag to show up.
Then try to catch a cab before the evening rush hour ties up your trip home.
The promise of the modern world is not, as we are so often led to believe, choice. Choice is a chimera—more choice produces only anxiety and discomfort. It's like sitting down to a restaurant with a menu the size of a small phone book, or staring at cable systems with hundreds of channels (and, of course, there are the precursor choices of whether to go with a satellite or a cable line, and which of half a dozen "plans" the provider is offering). It's too much to consider. Choice may be at the root of our notions of freedom—we want to be able to have the power to make choices—but choice is overrated. Too many choices results in paralysis, that gear-grinding-down feeling of accumulating weight, slowing reflexes, heavy clouds brewing overhead from the horizon, all narrowing down to a small point of indecision, indifference just behind your eyeballs. In other words, a brain fart.
We don't want choice in the modern world, but we do want speed. Choice creates uncertainty; speed is reliable. "Too fast!" is a refrain that enjoys little currency, but the complaint "Too slow!" is legend.
Modernity is about freedom, or the promise of freedom. That freedom is realized best in speed. Speed is the screaming fast plunge down a roller coaster; the breathtaking rush up the Stratosphere; or the blaze of house-size images racing by on an IMAX screen. It's escape and reinvention, it's possibility. Speed is what we want. It's beating a traffic light, shifting, and then the sure acceleration onto the freeway, the aggressive pass around a slow driver.
In entertainment, the rush of speed is implicit in every action-movie fight scene or car chase—implicit, essentially, in the very motion of motion pictures. It's there in every sporting event—the towering home-run shot, the running back surging through the line, the time trials of the Tour de France. It's in every frenzied guitar solo, or the stream-of-consciousness lyric power of every rapper, the virtuoso passages of every symphony or jazz improviser. The modern world is all about this rush.
In today's world, we consider speed in two ways. There is speed as movement, and there is speed as the time it takes to get things done. The first is the more visceral, of course, the physical rush of sudden, powerful activity. But the second is more pervasive. The marketplace is about speed. The liquidity of capital is an expression of speed—its ability to move unencumbered through cyberspace, across borders. Everywhere businesses are judged by how fast they respond to customers, how quickly they can outmaneuver competitors.
Ours is a world of fast food and instant copying, outpatient services, drive-through coffee lanes, ATMs, speed dating and broadband Internet. This world can quicken the pulse, too. I had used dial-up for some years—had transferred files over 56k, had downloaded music, and had thought little of it. It wasn't slow. I mean, it was slow, but it also was what it was. The first time I downloaded a song off of a high-speed connection, my heart raced. Its chief effect is just that: Even when we're standing still, we still feel like we're in motion.
Las Vegas offers its own twist on the allure of speed. It's not based on movement, and it's not entirely based on convenience. It is based on a rush of potential experiences—chance encounters with money, celebrities, sex, food—that can be crammed into what seems like the ideal visit-length to Sin City—somewhere between, say, 36 and 72 hours. It's a place you can get rich quick, get married quick, where speed visualizes itself in a roll of a wheel or the throw of dice. Las Vegas is also a site of rapid regeneration, where old structures are imploded to give way to new ones, and the city thrives on the hurtling pace of its own ongoing inventiveness.
Still, as much as speed is exhilaration, it is also anxiety. Will we go so fast that we lose control? Will we get there in time? Can we keep up? Speed is like some sort of Faustian pact. It promises us physical exhilaration and at least the pretense of an almost transcendental out-of-body experience, like if you could just go fast enough you could outrun your problems, outrun your limitations, outrun your fear, and be something new, if only for a moment. But the price is that speed is ever-present, time is always relentless, trying to squeeze more work out of us. And here, the old rift between the bustling city and the Arcadian countryside that has done so much to shape our suburban American society is no longer so adequate to tell us much. Speed does its work no matter where you are. The fast pace of life gets us everywhere.
On a long drive across Interstate 70, I once had the thought that the ideal interstate speed was 70 mph. This was fast enough to chew up a respectable chunk of the country in a day's driving, but not so fast that it made getting to the destination quickly an absolute imperative. It was slow enough to maintain a small connection with earlier generations, for whom a trip west was a Odyssean-like journey. It's funny that, while speed offers us a chance of instant reinvention, unlike anything known to previous generations, its modern forms threaten to take us to new places too fast. If nothing is sacrificed to journey from one end of the country to another, including time itself, how deep can such reinventions truly be?
So is there an ideal speed for the modern world? You know, amid the range of speeds from skydiving to rush-hour traffic jams, is there some sort of quantifiable number, some fact or figure, that represents an ideal mean? Is there an equation we could write that would reliably give us a sense of the personal pace in which we would live our lives? Is there a range that would allow us to feel energized by the modern world's opportunities yet not burnt out by its ceaseless demands?
Maybe a walk through your favorite park. Maybe a late-night cruise through the heart of the city, when traffic is down, and you can enjoy the sights and catch most of the lights. An early-morning run? I don't know, but somehow, as I think again about the start-and-stop movements of airports and airplanes, my mind lingers on that moving sidewalk. But now I'm not thinking about striding confidently down its length.
Instead, you step on it, and you put your bags down, and if you're lucky you have a window to look through and catch a glimpse of a plane racing down the runway, or the tails of planes taxiing gracefully to and fro, and you know that the world is constantly moving, never-ending, yet for a minute or two you don't have to lift a finger to move alongside it with such ease.