Flights

“They weren’t real travelers: they left in order to return. And they were relieved when they got back, with a sense of having fulfilled an obligation.”

The narrator expresses her disagreement with her parents’ philosophy of travel, which centered around yearly vacations. The narrator herself prefers constant movement and travel for the sake of travel rather than traveling in order to return with greater appreciation for one’s static home environment.

“And there is that other assumption, which is terribly dangerous—that we are constant, and that our reactions can be predicted.”

The narrator does not pursue a career in psychology, as she disagrees with personality profiling and its implications of static identity. The narrator prefers to believe personality is always in motion, just as her body constantly seeks out the motion of travel. Although her own writing frequently fills in the blanks of others’ personalities, it does so in a way that is episodic and fleeting.

“It is widely known, after all, that real life takes place in movement.”

The narrator’s philosophy of a purposeful life rests on an individual’s willingness to move, travel, and be curious. The narrator cites “real life” as existing in places that facilitate movement, such as airports (the location she is in when expressing this idea).

“Escaping their own lives, and then being safely escorted right back to them.”

As the narrator gives her opinion on the type of people who prefer traveling by train for short vacations, she explains that their escapism is limited; they safely resume their lives once they return home. This is in direct contrast to her own preferred way to travel, which requires her to leave everything behind and start anew in each location.

“I never have to be in any particular place at any particular time. Let time watch me, not me it.”

The narrator is willing to stay a night in the airport hotel after her flight has been overbooked. This quote expresses how the narrator interacts with the novel’s theme of fluid boundaries between time and space. The narrator regards herself as uninfluenced by the demand (closely associated with capitalist society) to be anywhere at a set time.

“Just when estuaries started to blend into the open waters of the seas, just when he’d enlist for a ship heading home, suddenly some new opportunity would arise, more often than not in the exact opposite direction, and if he did hesitate for a moment, he would usually come to the conclusion that the truest argument was an old one—the earth is round, let us not be too attached, then, to directions.”

In the vignette about Eryk the ferry captain, the narrator describes his wandering around the world in a way similar to her own travel philosophy. Like the narrator, Eryk moves from place to place without attachment, relishing the freedom of travel.

“Each of my pilgrimages aims at some other pilgrim.”

The narrator repeats this sentence with increasing frequency in the book’s fragmentary sections. Whenever she travels somewhere new, the narrator “aims” towards another “pilgrim” or the bodily remains of a pilgrim she admires (the latter often take the form of preserved specimens, wax figures, or collections of human curiosities). The phrase captures the relationship between travel and community as the narrator sees it; although her wanderings preclude long-lasting relationships, she is constantly finding and creating communities (partly through her own writing).

“Our sense of space results from our ability to move. Our sense of time, meanwhile, is due to being biological individuals undergoing distinct and changing states.”

Taken from a travel psychologist’s lecture that the narrator attended during her travels, this quote reflects the novel’s intersecting themes of movement, time, and space. Travel psychologists argue that time and space are constructs born of human movement, whether through our own lives (biological time) or through social relationality (“our sense of space”).

“Do not leave any unexplained, unnarrated situations.”

As representative of the narrator’s philosophy of writing, this quote demonstrates the narrator’s joy in being an anonymous observer. This anonymity allows her to create fictional tales that fill in the context and details of her observations—short narrative pieces that thematically coincide with her own travels.

“It’s hard to believe that parts of one’s own body are discovered as though one were forging one’s way upriver in search of sources.”

During her fictionalized account of Philip Verheyen and his student van Horssen, the narrator draws a connection between travel within the body and travel by means of the body. Similar to an unfamiliar country or a new tract of land, the body itself is a frontier. The narrator frequently returns to this theme through her stories about anatomists, preservation, and anatomical samples.

“There is only one thing we cannot have—eternal life, and, by God, whence did that concept come into our heads, that idea of being immortal?”

As Van Horssen and Verheyen watch Ruysch’s dissection, van Horssen reflects upon the false idea that immortality is attainable for man. This idea marks the increasing humanism developing during van Horssen’s time. Additionally, this quote interacts with the novel’s theme of preservation and movement, as many of the narrator’s fictionalized tales concern the quest for immortality through preserved specimens.

“Tales have a kind of inherent inertia that is never possible to fully control. They require people like me—insecure, indecisive, easily led astray. Naïve.”

The narrator shares her anxiety about the morality of writing stories and then contemplates how her personality encourages creative writing. She believes stories to be a form of travel—of movement and “inertia”—that she is easily swept up in.

“There is too much world, so it’s better to concentrate on particulars, rather than the whole.”

While describing postcards she finds in Rome, the narrator notes that they depict small details of the city and countryside rather than wider landscapes. The narrator attributes this to modern travel making the world so accessible as to be overwhelming; concentrating on small, defining characteristics of a place helps to locate the individual on the globe.

“Living organisms give themselves to one another, permit one another to make use of them.”

The narrator presents this theory of interdependency during the fictional story of the woman returning to Poland to help her terminally ill former lover die. The woman is a biologist and views the world as a system of relationships that require cooperative sacrifice. This contrasts with the narrator’s own lonely life, without responsibilities to other people or the need to sacrifice her love for travel (though the reciprocal nature of her writing functions as its own form of interconnectivity and even sacrifice).

“You have to make peace with the fact that in the end there won’t be individual ecosystems. The world all sloshed together in a single sludge.”

During the story of the biologist and her terminally ill lover, the biologist asserts that the borders between ecosystems are quickly dissolving due to the accessibility of travel and trade. This quote presents a different perspective on the novel’s theme of movement, as the dissolution of these boundaries will eventually lead to a single, homogenized global ecosystem.

“Which means there must be some fixed point around which all of my perambulations revolve. Too far from what, too near to what?”

Though the narrator believes in movement and uses her writing to argue for travel, experience, and novelty, she begins to wonder whether she will settle down in a particular city in the future. When she visits a new place, it is with an evaluative eye, though she cannot place exactly what quality she is looking for in a more permanent home. The idea loosely mirrors that of kairos—a time particularly appropriate for a given and decisive action.

“Each slice is part of the whole, but it’s governed by its own rules. The three-dimensional order, reduced and imprisoned in a two-dimensional layer, seems abstract. You might even think that there was no whole, that there never had been.”

The narrator describes her theory of life as a cross section—a compilation of “slices” that aggregate into a large whole. Without perceiving the importance of these slices, a person cannot understand the whole. This quote describes the narrator’s writing style, as her fragmentary writing and short fictional pieces serve as “slices” of her own character that combine to form a clear picture of her.

“My only consolation was that there were others like me—a small group of people leaving the town of X with a nine in their pockets. Perhaps even unconsciously we create a kind of community.”

After discovering that she has forgotten to return a hotel room key—the very one that the porter warned others continually lose—the narrator questions whether this incorporates her into a community of travelers. The narrator is touched by this unexpected connection she has made with people she will never meet again. This corresponds to the way in which she creates connections with the strangers she meets by writing about them.

“Nothing is innocent, and nothing is insignificant, it’s all a big endless puzzle.”

Kunicki struggles to preserve his sanity following his wife’s inexplicable reappearance. His obsession with her causes him to consider signs, motives, and connections in everything he encounters, but he is unable to piece them together into a coherent explanation. Furthermore, this quote reflects the interconnectedness of the narrator’s fragments and fictional stories—a composition similar to a puzzle for the reader to assemble.

“There was something inhuman in all this—to be able to fit all that knowledge in himself, the professor must have needed to perform some special biological procedure, permitting it to grow into his tissues, opening his body to it and becoming a hybrid. Otherwise, it would have been impossible.”

Karen, the wife of the Hellenic studies professor, decides against leaving her much older husband because she is enamored of his intelligence. This quote discusses the novel’s theme of preservation through the lens of academia and connects the professor to characters such as Dr. Blau and Philip Verheyen.

“In reality, movement doesn’t exist. Like the turtle in Zeno’s paradox, we’re heading nowhere, if anything we’re simply wandering into the interior of a moment, and there is no end, nor any destination. And the same might apply to space—since we are all identically removed from infinity, there can also be no somewhere—nothing is truly anchored on any day, nor in any place.”

Spoken by the Hellenic professor on the cruise ship Poseidon, this quote reflects themes of fluidity between time and space and the necessity of movement. It presents space and time as false human constructs; in reality there is no distinction between the two. Humans believe we are moving forward in time or space, but in actuality we are revolving around the same point.

“Just take Kairos, who always operates at the intersection of linear, human time and divine time—circular time. At the intersection between place and time, at that moment that opens up for just a little while, to situate that single, right, unrepeatable possibility.”

During a lecture on the Poseidon that the narrator attends, the professor mentions the Greek god Kairos and his association with circular time. This quote directly relates to Kunicki’s story, whose wife wrote the word kairos on a museum ticket shortly before her disappearance. In keeping with the novel’s discussion of the fluidity between time and place, the professor presents kairos as an analogy for the true nature of time and place (as distinct from time and place as human constructs).

“The experts say these plastic bags open up a whole new chapter of earthly existence, breaking nature’s age-old habits. They’re made up of their surfaces exclusively, empty on the inside, and this historic forgoing of all contents unexpectedly affords them great evolutionary benefits.”

The narrator’s comment on plastic bags as a new species combines her previous discussion of plastinated organs with that of human litter, destruction, and consumption. The narrator actively seeks out preserved organs, as they represent both the life within herself and other humans and the complexity of human bodies. In contrast, plastic bags have no internal structure yet persist all over the Earth—a seemingly hypocritical species from the narrator’s perspective.