Terminal Sickness

Heaven and Hell. They're pretty much the most extreme things, up or down, that you can say about anything. If you want to put something down or put it on a pedestal, you simply need to compare it to hell or heaven, respectively. From our place on earth, heaven and hell are nebulous, unknown concepts, yet we use them as metaphors so often that it seems we have intimate knowledge of them. Well, I have no idea of heaven or hell, but I do know this: the closest you'll get to Purgatory on Earth is an airport terminal.

Terminal C at DFW to be exact, at least in my case. That's where I found myself this morning, when I realized that airport terminals are the loneliest busy, crowded places in the world. In Dante, purgatory is where you go when your destination is known but you have to spend a certain (predestined and handed down from God but variable and seemingly arbitrary to man) amount of time in a hell-like place before you can travel to your permanent home. Sure sounds like a layover to me.

Of course, in Dante, the sinners who are bound for heaven spend their time working off the mortal sins that have been marked on their forehead. In an airport, however, travelers seem to be indulging their characteristic weaknesses. Workahololics, junk-food addicts, and techie loners have all the PDAs, cinnamon rolls, and iPods they need to indulge their greatest vices without the discouraging social norms that characterize the rest of the world.

Airport terminals are the ultimate metaphor for the detatchment we have been able to achieve while remaining entirely connected. On a layover, you can connect with anywhere in the world and can be completely incapable of having a meaningful face-to-face interaction, and you often don't even know what the city you're in is like outside of the walls of the airport.

Whenever my Protestant friends ask me what the idea is behind purgatory, I always struggle to come up with a satisfactory response. Maybe this is as close as I will ever get: There are no BlackBerrys in heaven, so purgatory is where you go to clear out your inbox before entering the pearly gates.