I think the phenomenology of the train ride in comparison to flight explains the austerity of our times— a train ride is an expanded domain of movement— you can walk on the train, you can go into different rooms, you can even have your own room. Rich people get private jets to get the quality of life of a luxury suite on a train— but even they have to be locked in lift off & landing— literally restrained, like being in a car. The train is just a long hallway which is itself moving— it is the feeling of walking on a peoplemover amplified— it feels like “walking over massive space” with a colossal gait— being on an airplane feels like being a package, like a drugged animal in a cargo hold.
There is a romance to walking to the train station & getting on the train & then getting off the train & walking directly out into the human world again. The airport however is like entering Dantean retail surveillance hell, being strapped to a gurney, MKUltraing yourself with slop, & then agonizingly exiting through the layers of Dantean hell that surround the airport, which is never “in the city” but in its own deterritorialized nonplace adjacent to it.
I believe these are reflective & constructive elements of life— a society that produces a sense of republican social being embraces the train & the train evokes in the traingoer a sense of republican social being— the passenger on the airplane basically “oks” themselves with this financial-surveillance hell— “Sure scan my asshole search my bags I’m popping a xanax & passing out to a Marvel movie, just make this suffering end”— we produced this, but it also produces us.
On the train, you make friends— there is room to do this, you can sit at the bar— on the airplane you are locked into an acquaintance with a stranger who must, by design, intrude upon your limited personal space & you cannot leave to find somewhere else to sit…
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