Flight attendant Sherri was always quick to offer airsick bags. Reverse-bulimia, though a disgusting disease, was bearable for her when the meals were fresh.

— Jack Kilborn, Hint Fiction

He realized, taking a long swig from his beer, that no one had told him whether swallowing the octopus was guaranteed to kill it.

— Jess Row, Hint Fiction

If we should start telling the truth that we are nothing but Jews, it would mean that we would expose ourselves to the fate of human beings who, unprotected by any specific law or political convention, are nothing but human beings. I can hardly imagine an attitude more dangerous, since we actually live in a world in which human beings as such have ceased to exist for quite a while . . .

— Hannah Ardent, “We Refugees” (1943)

We found him in a motel a mile north of  San Quentin. He had the Gideon open on the nightstand so the boy would see.

— Ben Jahn, Hint Fiction

Grandpa breathes from a tank. He’s selling the ranch because he doesn’t have any air.

Mama says, I’m your heir.

He says, You’re a girl.

— Jane Hammons, Hint Fiction

We set the pace.
But this press of time —
take it as a little thing
next to what endures.

All this hurrying
soon will be over.
Only when we tarry
do we touch the holy.

Young ones, don’t waste your courage
racing so fast,
flying so high.

See how all things are at rest —
darkness and morning light,
blossom and book.

— Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus I, 22

There are those odd optimists among us who, having made a lot of optimistic speeches, go home and turn on the gas or make use of a skyscraper in quite an unexpected way. They seem to prove that our proclaimed cheerfulness is based on a dangerous readiness for death. Brought up in the conviction that life is the highest good and death the greatest dismay, we became witnesses and victims of worse terrors than death — without having been able to discover a higher ideal than life.

— Hannah Ardent, “We Refugees” (1943)

There is a peculiar way in which getting somewhere too fast may lead us to fail to appreciate or see it, because we properly apprehend things only by recreating them in our imaginations through delay or absence.

By Alain de Botton
WSJ.com

Over the course of a week last year, I found myself spending a good deal of my waking—and sleeping—hours at Heathrow airport. I’d been appointed Heathrow airport’s first writer-in-residence, which involved writing a book about a week spent living at the airport. My tenure overlapped with the Icelandic volcano eruption, and while there I observed hundreds of the most frustrated passengers in the world sitting out the ash cloud chaos. As they had time on their hands and I had a desk with a sign above it saying “Writer-in-Residence,” many people came and regaled me with stories of disaster: weddings missed, contracts canceled, affairs on hold… Yet as they spoke, I couldn’t help but sense a certain pleasure they were taking in these dramatic tales. It was almost as if these stranded passengers were for the first time feeling themselves to be true travelers, adventurers rubbing up against the gritty coal face of intercontinental transit, rather than shrink-wrapped units that eventlessly glide across the airline logistics network.

Whatever the advantages of plentiful, swift and convenient air travel, we may curse it for sometimes being not painful or slow enough to help us derive the real advantage of travel: a sense of change. We arrive in Mumbai or Rio, Auckland or Montego Bay only hours after leaving home, with a touch of jet lag at worst, our phones whirring with messages, our history still clinging to us like goosegrass burrs. There is a peculiar way in which getting somewhere too fast may lead us to fail to appreciate or see it, because we properly apprehend things only by recreating them in our imaginations through delay or absence. Venice must have felt a great deal more real when one had to cross the Alps to reach it. We are too often cursed by the speed with which our technology fulfills our desires. No sooner have we thought of the Mount of Olives than we can theoretically be on our way there and so have no opportunity to suffer the immense interval between desire and gratification that pilgrims to Jerusalem once endured, and which, for all its unpleasantness, had the incalculable benefit of allowing them to imaginatively inhabit and lay claim to their destination.

I mention pilgrims because religions have been very sensitive to the paradoxical benefits of difficult journeys. Medieval travel in Europe was hard at the best of times, but committed Catholic pilgrims went out of their way to make it even harder, foregoing the use of river barges or horses in favor of their own feet. A pilgrimage from northern Europe to the remains of St. James the Apostle in Santiago could take eight months, with pilgrims leaving in the spring not making it back before the onset of winter. These pilgrims were not being perverse in their insistence on slowness and difficulty. They were aware that one of our central motives for traveling is a desire to put the regrettable aspects of the past behind us. Furthermore, they knew that one of the most effective ways of achieving a feeling of distance from follies, vanity and sinfulness is to introduce something very large—like the experience of a frustrating month-long journey across a desert or a mountain range—between our past and our desired future. Our attempts at inner transition can be cemented by a protracted and hazardous trip. If inner change is difficult, then we may need a commensurately difficult outer journey to inspire and goad us.

It’s evident that modern travel can be frustrating and never quite as easy as we would hope. Nevertheless, beneath the surface disgruntlement, in my time at Heathrow, I often spotted signs of a childish thrill to be once again on the road, free of routine, open to new experiences. There is a nomadic side to all of us that not even the most hellish airport can fully subsume.

In any case, difficult trips have the benefit of teasing out some of the underlying ambitions of travel. They mean that our journeys are no longer mere blanks, without any power to alter our future, and once again have a minor chance to play a role in the development of our souls

The service stairs were next to the main stairs, separated only by a wall, but what a difference there was between them: the narrow back stairs, dangerously unrailed, under the bleak gleam of a skylight, each step worn down to a steep hollow, turned tightly in a deep grey shaft; whereas the great main sweep, a miracle of cantilevers, dividing and joining again, was hung with the portraits of prince-bishops, and had ears of corn in its wrought-iron banisters that trembled to the tread. It was glory at last, an escalation of delight, from which small doors, flush with the panelling, moved by levers below the prince-bishops’ high-heeled and rosetted shoes, gave access, at every turn, to the back stairs, and their treacherous gloom. How quickly, without noticing, one ran from one to the other, after the proud White Rabbit, a well-known Old Harrovian porn star with a sphincter that winked as bells rang, crowds murmured and pigeons flopped about the dormer window while Nick woke and turned in his own little room again, in the comfortable anticlimax of home.

On his back, in the curtained light, the inveterate habits of home took hold of him without a word . . .

— Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty

No themes are so human as those that reflect for us, out of the confusion of life, the close connexion of bliss and bale, of the things that help with the things that hurt, so dangling before us for ever that bright hard medal, of so strange an alloy, one face of which is somebody’s right and ease and the other somebody’s pain and wrong.

— Henry James, 1908 preface to What Maisie Knew

He fumbled across the pillow to stroke his wife’s shoulder.

“Ailie — you sleeping already?”

“That’s Tracy,” answered a voice at his back. “I’m over here.”

–Kirk Curnutt, Hint Fiction

When, on his deathbed, he last saw her, she had not aged by so much as a day.

— Peter Straub, Hint Fiction

When they opened the cadaver, they found a house. A couple argued inside. There was rhythm to their words, like the beating of a heart.

–Barry Napier, Hint Fiction

The knight rides forth in coal-black steel
into the teeming world.

Outside his armor everything is there: sunlight and valley,
friend and foe and feast,
May, maiden, forest and grail,
and God himself in a thousand forms
to be found along every road.

But inside the armor darkly enclosing him
crouches death. And the thought comes
and comes again:
When will the blade
pierce this iron sheath,
the undeserved and liberating blade
that will fetch me from my hiding place
where I’ve been so long compressed —

so that, at last, I may stretch my limbs
and hear my full voice.

— Rilke, Book of Images

Never, not for a single day, do we let
the space before us be so unbounded
that the blooming of one flower is forever.

— Rilke, From the Eighth Duino Elegy