These Days, Miracles Are Cheap
It’s never been easier to escape. It’s never been more necessary.
That’s as far as France goes.
That little outcrop there, that bulge into the cold blue waters of the Channel. I saw it just the other day on my way to England, on a flight that cost me €16.
All of this was unthinkable not long ago.
Not just the passenger jet with its three hundred seats, its droning engines that can send a hundred tons of malleable aluminium and mangleable human flesh hurtling at 840 km an hour, 12,000 meters above the ground.
It’s not that miracles are achievable that continues to astound me, even after all the flights, the hopping back-and-forth between continents, the dozen or so different lives I’ve been able to lead because I live now, instead of at any other point in human history.
It’s the fact it’s so cheap.
I can make €16 in less than ten minutes. I can cover the cost of traveling all of France and half of the UK at close to the speed of sound by writing about three hundred words.
And while my co-passengers pull the blinds down against the light, while they busy themselves and bury themselves in glowing screens that endlessly screech bad news, I sit by the window where the light is…
