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END OF THE INNOCENCE**
. "After travelling, there is something irremediably melancholic about the business of being reunited with one's luggage. After hours in the air free of encumbrance, spurred on to formulate hopeful plans for the future by the view of coasts and forests below, passengers are reminded, on standing at the carousel of all that is material and burdensome in existence. There are some elemental dualities at work in the contrasting realms of the baggage-reclaim hall and the airplane - dichotomies of matter and spirit, heaviness and lightness, body and soul - with the negative halves of the equations all linked to the stream of almost identical black Samsonite cases that rolled ceaselessly along the tunnels and belts of the exquisite conveyor apparatus.Around the carousel, as in a Roman traffic jam, trolley grimly refuse to cede so much as a centimeter to one another. Although each suitcase is a repository of dense and likely fascinating individuality - this one perhaps containing a lime-coloured bikini and an unread copy of Civilization and it's Discontents, that one a dressing gown stolen from Seattle and a packet of Roche antidepressants - this was not the place to start thinking about anyone else. So what dignity must we possess not to show any hesitation when it becomes clear, in the course of a twelve-second scan of the line, that we are indeed alone on life's travels. What maturity not to mind that only two meters from us, a casually dressed young man perhaps employed in the life-guard industry, has been met with a paroxysm of joy by a thoughtful-looking young woman with whose mouth he is now involved. And what a commitment to reality it will take for us not to wish that we might, just for a time, be not our own tiresome selves but rather another, someone flying in from Los Angeles after a gap year in London - whose devoted lover is at hand. Bearer of many gifts, a flawless diamond - the proposal of a life together, as sparkling as the imaginary future ....
**Title from a song by Don Henley
**Title from a song by Don Henley