Passages

It’s a kind of places that every traveller knows. Also when you are not travelling, you’ll certainly often have gone through them: passages. You cannot avoid them, although you would rather stay there as short as possible for passages are usually annoying and boring and sometimes even lugubrious. It does not need to be so, however, and some are even pleasant in a way.

Passages connect places that are meaningful for you. You leave home and go to your work. Then you have to travel before you are there, so you spend some time in the bus or tram or train and at a bus stop or tram stop or in a railway station. Most of what you do there is waiting and being moved, which is also a kind of waiting, namely a waiting till you are “there”. You try to kill your time – by reading or with your smartphone. You don’t know the other travellers around you, although maybe you have seen them already many times. And they don’t know you. You don’t talk to them. Often you even don’t greet them. You are also not interested in the type of vehicle you are travelling with, as long as it brings you quickly where you want to be.

It’s basically the same when you travel with your own car, although some people can tell a lot about its properties. Then you are even physically separated from your fellow-travellers by the structure of your car, which is a cage you have put yourself in. The public transport has been replaced by your private transport moving on the road or highway. For air travellers the story is also more or less the same.

When thinking of passages some typical sites you pass on your trips and travels come first to the mind: Railway stations; a parking place on the highway where you take a rest before driving on; the place where you have to wait on the airport before being allowed to pass the gate to the plane. They include also the spaces with restaurants and shops on airfields, for usually you are there only because you are on the way and not because you want to buy something or want to eat outdoors. These are some striking examples of passages, indeed, but if you think a bit about it, you’ll find many more, often of different types. They are certainly not limited to travelling. To mention a few: The waiting room of a doctor, tunnels, corridors in all their meanings, shops, warehouses, hotels. Passages are everywhere. Some sites usually function as passages but need not always be so. For instance: A hotel is often a place where you stay in function of going somewhere else. But maybe you celebrate your wedding there. Then it is rather a destination then a passage. Generally a passage does not have a meaning of its own, but derives it from being a kind of connection.