The past two months have been busy, with me criss-crossing the United States to visit family and to promote my book (more on this below*). I’m now back in Seoul for a quick pause, and then off to the UK later this summer. Such activity entails a lot of flying and while there is a constant low hum of guilt in my mind about how bad it is for the planet, I am unapologetic for my love of being 40,000ft above the earth — though it appears that there may be a dwindling number of people who share my affection for flying, or at least show it. 

For my part, I’ve become that person, the one with the shade up, gazing out the window and letting in bright sunlight while everyone else is trying to sleep or watch something or, increasingly, scroll or text. Even I have let myself send a few messages from high altitudes, and now rather miss the days when there was no connectivity. However, quite a few airlines here in Asia don’t have in-flight WIFI so I can occasionally indulge in being disconnected.

This expansion of entertainment and increased WIFI might also contribute to the fact that I’ve had far fewer conversations with my seat-mates in recent times, though to be fair, I also pop in my AirPods when I don’t feel chatty. I keep a running file of interesting conversations I’ve had with people on airplanes who I’ll never meet again, (everything is copy!) and it’s not been updated since a flight between Cartagena and Bogota in the summer of 2023. I’ve been on planes many times since then, but only had perfunctory chats, if that. I’d like to think we have not run out of things to talk about, but no doubt it feels easier to don our earphones and tune out the rest of the passengers.

I came to flying late, thanks to the dynamics of a father who flew extensively around the U.S., Europe, and Asia as part of his job, and a mother who found flying the ultimate form of claustrophobia (though to be fair, later in life she pushed past it and crossed the Atlantic a few times). This meant that most of my childhood travels involved road trips to Ohio to visit family, or holiday spots reachable by car, like coastal Georgia. I didn’t take to the skies until I was the grand old age of 20, after which I never looked back. 

I’ve also never stopped looking out of the window. 

My favourite moment is hitting cruising altitude or thereabouts, when there is no cloud cover and it’s possible to see the toy town version of the world below, the ants going about their business. As I gaze, I look at the route on the flight tracking map, if there is one, and think about the places we are above. Cities, pastures, lakes, suburbs. It’s a smooth and frictionless world, where problems and difficulties are too far away to be seen. There are so many unexpected vistas as well. In certain areas, such the deserts of Arizona, it looks as if we’re cruising over the moon. On a recent flight to Tokyo, I was dazzled by our route over snowy mountains in the west of the country (see the main picture above, or click on ‘read on blog’ if it didn’t come though on the email). This is, perhaps, a paradoxical way of appreciating nature given the climate connection, but there are certain vistas that are simply impossible on the ground.

My mind also takes its own meandering journey between mental waypoints. Pilot Mark Vanhoenacker has written of this in his poetic book about flying, Skyfaring. He observes that at these great heights ‘we find room for introspection in one of the last places we might have thought to look for it’. He relishes the opportunity to use ‘these incredibly rare quiet hours in which there is nowhere we have to go and nothing we have to go, hours in which we are alone with our thoughts and music and the moving pictures of our journeys’.

Perhaps because I spend a lot of my job thinking about how slowly people moved before the 20th century — horseback, on foot, by ship — and how long it took for something as simple as a letter to reach its intended reader, I never tire of flying. It has been one of the most profound technical ruptures that humans have ever created. And yet we complain about leg room and baggage allowance! 

All of this being said, I too shut the window blind and watch a few films (a necessity on the 14-hour flights from Korea), but I tend do that when there is nothing but a vast ocean below, or a blanket of cloud blocking the view. Recently, though, I have become more self-conscious of my habit, my window now often the source of the only chink of light in the entire cabin, while everyone else is looking at their seat screen or personal devices. I try to position myself in the seat to block the light or I only lift the shade halfway, so as not to disturb them, all the while wanting to tell those people in the window seats to shut off their screens and gaze into the distance for five minutes.

I suppose there are a number of reasons that people no longer look out the window. It could be that it’s easier for nervous fliers to watch a film and not think too hard about their surroundings. For others who have been flying since childhood, the plane might be just another space, like a lounge, where they can hang out and scroll. Or maybe it’s the growing inability of any of us to simply sit still and watch the world go by. Perhaps the reason I enjoy doing that so much on planes is that I no longer do it enough when I’m on the ground. 

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What I’m … watching

This is a bit of an awkward segue, moving from the joys of flying to the grim horror of plane crashes, but like many Gen-Xers, I could not resist the retro siren song of Love Story, the streaming series about the last years of JFK Jr and Carolyn Bessette, which I finished earlier this week. Although I was not in New York City in the late 1990s, the show resonated with my early 20s, both as I was finishing up university and my first years in London. The smoking! The lack of smart phones! The ubiquity of Calvin Klein products and advertisements! My enthusiasm was somewhat dimmed after Daryl Hannah rightly took umbrage with the series in a New York Times comment piece over the unfair depiction of her as JFK Jr’s ex. Perhaps it was this, or perhaps it was the ramping up of the melodrama in the later episodes, but my interest waned as the series wore on to its deadly finale. Indeed, the lack of a happy ending seems the fate of many women who entered the Kennedy orbit, as I found out by reading a book last year by Maureen Callahan, grimly titled Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed. I am not a Kennedy obsessive by any stretch, but Ask Not came out in 2024 and I was curious not only about the seemingly bottomless appeal of the Kennedy family, but about how these sorts of celebrity best-sellers read. And the answer is, with a lot of energy, pace, and drama. I’m not sure I can exactly graft some of her techniques on to my own work, but it’s often instructive to see what works for some writers, and I wanted to look under the hood of the sort of book that will sell truckloads of copies. One part of it, no doubt, is the subject matter. Not that you’ll be seeing a Kennedy book from me any time soon (though, hmmmmm ….). At any rate, I was struck by one paragraph of Daryl Hannah’s article where she writes:

‘Many people believe what they see on TV and do not distinguish between dramatization and documented fact — and the impact is not abstract. In a digital era, entertainment often becomes collective memory. Real names are not fictional tools. They belong to real lives.’ 

Entertainment as collective memory: an astute observation from someone who unfortunately found her reality dramatised into something altogether different. It is also a point worth reflecting on for those of us who write the stories of others: are we hewing as close to the truth as we can, or are we aiming to be entertaining in the service of storytelling? I had started watching this series as a bit of 90s escapism, but came away with some useful questions for my own writing practice, which was an unexpected result but a welcome one.

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* I’ve been busy!

Here are some podcasts and interviews I’ve done recently, for your viewing/listening pleasure, with more coming soon:

• An in-depth discussion with Amanda Brickell Bellows on Book Breaks with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

• A great conversation with Philip McKenzie on his The Deep Dive podcast. Listen on Spotify or Apple.

• A wide-ranging interview with Tyrel Cameron Eskelson on his Interlocutor Podcast.

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If you liked this essay, leave a comment. Or buy me a drink! Or treat yourself to one of my books!