The Romance of a Journey: Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights.
“It is widely known, after all, that real life takes place in movement”.
Our world has stopped. This much is observable. It can be heard or rather, not heard in the empty skies, the clear roads and the absence of commute chatter. In Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, each short story — which run from a few economical paragraphs to long passages of rich narrative- finds romance in the ritualistic ways we travel and the influence it has on our bodies which contain histories, geographies, politics of their own. Reading Flights during a time when it is forbidden, taboo, dangerous to travel, when a life-threatening ‘thing’ is free to travel in and out of our bodies, feels voyeuristic. As if peaking through the pressurised glass of an air plane you cannot leave, looking down at lands you may know or not, wondering what’s to be seen closer to the ground.
In Flights, a journey is almost a natural bodily process. Using historic examples, personal anecdotes and fictional nomads from all over the world, Tokarczuk depicts a world that is deeply interconnected, like the nervous system of a human being. We travel down the spine of continents, tectonic plates, airport runways as if “we are the individual nerve impulses of the world, fractions of an instant”.
This metaphor of movement feels healing now in a global context where time simultaneously feels rapid, erratic and yet lethargic and stretched out. The book presents life through the lens of three essential questions: where have you come from? Where are you going? Why? A triptych that distils the essence of any human story. Utilised by backpackers, commuters, airport attendants, security guards, you name it. These questions still exist and we still use them but the number of possible answers has been decimated. Tokarczuk tells stories where these questions are answered with breathtaking range. How should we answer them?
The Right Time and Place briefly explores the idea that within the world’s coordinate system, there is a “perfect point where time and space reach an agreement”. This place might be many journeys away, or just around the corner. It is something that people travel to seek out, knowingly or not in order to achieve some hidden level of happiness. If they exist at all, the ideal coordinates probably change according to the person and the circumstances of their life. We all dream of being somewhere else, now more than ever. Where is your right time and place? I’ve found catharsis in asking my loved ones this question.
One recurring aspect of Flights we can take comfort in is that there is no ending. Not really. When one journey ends it opens the door for a million more, like a collision of atoms that come together to form a new whole. The same aspect of life that now connects us all to a shared vulnerability is also our strength. There will always be enough of us to carry the stories of others, to keep them on our map, they are never lost and neither are we. When a journey is shelved to the past — which only exists in our heads, because we’re privileged enough to keep such things — it enters a new phase of reinterpretation, of nostalgia, of romance.
In the story Chopin’s Heart, friends and family of Chopin mourn his death but they also keep him alive in some way. Chopin’s actual heart is removed and covertly transported, acting as a prop that binds the people together as they journey for his funeral. They sit at campfires and talk, reminiscing about the awful accuracy of Chopin’s impersonations, trading stories so that each person has as many as possible to remember.
“we will simply write each other down, which is the safest form of communication and of transit; we will reciprocally transform each other into letters and initials, immortalise each other, plastinate each other, submerge each other in formaldehyde phrases and pages.”
Architecture has also served this purpose, to visually remind us of our histories. Aesthetics either remind us of things that have been or attempt to capture what is now, a distinction which fades with time. An aesthetic will belong to the past almost as soon as it is conjured. Stories are like this; regardless of when it arrived, does a story feel true to how we currently feel? In an era of inertia, Flights feels like a manifesto. We will live, move, die. But we will do it together, in airport terminals, in train carriages, on foot. We will explore and explore and explore the earth and then we will return to it. That’s the bargain we’ve struck. We leave behind our belongings, our buildings, our music, our voices, our stories. We leave behind those still capable of taking our journey and neatly folding it into the suitcase they take on theirs. We will live forever, as long as the sun comes up. As long as people get out of bed, put their clothes on and continue to move. A glorious revolt against nothingness.
Until then, then.
