Tomorrow I'm getting on a plane.
"...once again I was struck by the brutal, impersonal quality of this form of departure. I have never ceased to be touched in some indefinable way by a ship casting off and moving out to sea. There is something symbolic about it to which the hungry, starved rationalism of our twentieth-century mind instantly and inevitably responds. The ship is of the authentic, antique material of the imagination. It must be impossible for a person of average sensitiveness to say good-bye to someone he loves who is going away in a ship, without experiencing, whether he likes it or not, something of the truth of the trite, but the none-the-less pointed French proverb "Partir c'est mourir un peu". Even at a railway station, the flutter of a handkerchief, the wave of a hand or a face looking back at one from a window, to some extend redeems the train's impersonal yet hysterical departure. The aeroplane makes none of these concessions. There is no interval between the "being here" and the "going there"; the two conditions are created, as it were, with one stroke of the knife, and one is left with a vague, uncomprehended sense of shock. One feels as if one had been subjected to a lightning amputation."
- Laurens Van der Post, Venture to the Interior
