Starting Out

The landscape appears out of focus, with no clear outlines and solid forms. Its edges are dissolving; parts are fading into one another. The view is fuzzy, blurred, details are impossible to make out, only vast unities are visible to the naked eye. A grey cube-­shaped building, myriads of parked cars in every colour, the sky smeared with clouds, on the horizon, an arc of trees or perhaps a forest.

Our protagonist is contemplating the landscape through the lense of reading glasses, from behind the steering wheel. The low, windowless cube is a shopping centre with a huge car park, while further away, there’s a bleak airport. The grimness is softened by being viewed through glasses. There is no vanishing point, no sharp lines, no perspective. Sky and land merge together on the horizon, without conveying a sense of depth. Even the light is more muted.

Heading into the sun has lost its charm.

This airport is the grimmest place our protagonist has ever seen, but the plus lenses in her glasses makes even concrete and metal appear somewhat softer. This time, it isn’t her turn to fly, only to wait for someone, which brings a sense of relief. Where’s that former self who was so keen on airports? When did this change? Is it possible to have seen enough, once and for all?

There was a time when just standing there, waiting, tied to a spot, would have seemed impossible – the very act of stopping would have been a sign of defeat. When did that former passion for travel vanish? Even this present journey was a torture. Where’s the person who used to grab every single opportunity to get going, keen to take possession of the whole wide world? Where’s that inner Hannibal who crosses the Alps in a snowstorm, just as Turner painted it, commemorating the dark stormy sky, menacing like a wave, and the cascading avalanche, rather than the minor historical hero: Turner knew how we must always struggle with landscape, and not with people and foreign tribes. In the distance, there’s sunshine and the promising warm lights of Rome, while at the forefront, Hannibal fights the elements by way of a snowstorm. These two contrasting weathers perhaps can’t even co-­exist in actual time and in such proximity, in a shared moment, that is to say in the so-­called ‘real’, but only in the painter’s dreams.

What has our protagonist gained or conquered while going round the world?

In the autumn, there’ll be another flight to undertake though. Wouldn’t it be somehow possible to just get there without embarking on an actual journey? When agreeing to this prospective travel to a small Northern town, barely traceable on the map, the unknown landscape and foreign climate had some mysterious lure. The inv