I stumble this extract on a book I was reading for tomorrow's Popular Text class and thought, I ought to share this. I wonder how many of you can relate to this?
Here in the airport lounge, how becalmed we voyagers are, all spellbound and dreambound! How equable this climate – this mild, well-regulated air, untouched by frost or torrid heat, or the bite or chilling wind! Suspended between Somewhere and Elsewhere, we bask in the Light of Anywhere. It is a place where fantasies luxuriate. As our feet wander the mute and carpeted acres, our eyes flit speculatively among figures and faces. Look, now, at this man coming towards us. His neat blue suit proclaims the businessman, but who knows what underworlds of espionage, what services to a secret cause are implicated in that brief-case? Those policemen at the boarding gate are tensely waiting for the two drug-trafficking Mafiosi to show up. That woman’s elegance, ever so slightly ruffled – for her silk scarf hangs negligently, and she has just dropped a glove – tells is that she is on her way to meet her lover, the American neurosurgeon, who will never marry her as long as his demented wife (of whom she has no knowledge) still lingers on in the expensive Swiss clinic. Here we all are, in this Land of In-Between. We are characters in enjoyably bad books, it seems. We are in the right place for Popular Fiction.
— Walter Nash, The language of Popular Fiction, 1990.
