Could Literature Cure the Fear of Flying?

Travel Blog  •  Eva Holland  •  08.19.09 | 12:08 PM ET

In the latest issue of Granta, Javier Marias has a fun and thoughtful essay about his fear of flying and how it has started to abate in recent years. And, he believes, “a little more literature” would help him, and other nervous fliers, feel even more confident:

I would like to ask Iberia, in this the twenty-first century, to abandon their anodyne patriotic gestures and adulatory nods to the Catholic Church—all those planes called Our Lady of the Pillar and Our Lady of Good Remedy, The City of Burgos and The City of Tarragona—and instead choose names that are more cheerful and more literary. I, for one, would feel safer and more reassured, more protected, if I knew I was flying in the The Red Eagle or The Fire Arrow or even Achilles or Emma Bovary or Falstaff or Liberty Valance or Nostromo.

(Via The Morning News)

Tags: Air Travel, Literature, Literary Travel

Eva Holland is co-editor of World Hum. She is a former associate editor at Up Here and Up Here Business magazines, and a contributor to Vela. She's based in Canada's Yukon territory.


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