I flew out of Los Angeles this morning for five days of business and pleasure in Nashville, Tennessee. Tucked under my arm as I walked through LAX was a paperback copy of a book I’d always mean to read, “The Bell Jar,” by Sylvia Plath.

While I was checking my bag outside, the next lady in line leaned forward and said, “Oh, what are you reading? ‘The Bell Jar.’ Hm.”

Inside, while she was ensuring I wasn’t a terrorist hiding explosives in my iPad, the blonde TSA Agent scanning my boarding pass and license said, ” ‘The Bell Jar.’ How is that?”

A few minutes later, the pleasant and attractive sandwich girl selling me a severely overpriced comestible for my longish flight said, “Now what is that you’re reading? ‘The Bell Jar’? Is that any good? Should I read that?”

I couldn’t figure out any of this special treatment. Yeah, I’ve got a book — so what? Had they all heard of “The Bell Jar” and this was their chance to ask about its merits? Then I started looking around — all up and down LAX and, later, all up and down the aisle of my particular flight, and noticed that I was the only person with a book. No one else I could see anywhere had so much as a magazine, or even a newspaper — they all had smartphones or tablets — but I had an actual book.

I started to feel like the last carrier pigeon, with everyone else watching me take flight.

On the plane, a moon-faced lady with a black mop of hair in a Little Lotta style and upper arms like dappled ham hocks and sporting an Angry Birds wristwatch with a thick black rubberized band, wedged herself into the seat between me and the old lady in the aisle seat. The moment we ascended into the clouds, she dredged her smartphone from a crevasse somewhere on her person and took a photo across the frontage of my face and out the window. There was nothing out there but clouds, but she captured them.

About 10 minutes later, she took another one.

Throughout the flight, as she munched down a six-ounce can of roast almonds, a bag of PopCorners (“The new shape of popcorn!”), a perfunctory apple, and absolutely everything proffered by the flight attendant, including pretzels, cookies, and nut-substitutes, and, yes, topping it all off with the requisite Diet Coke, she continued to snap photos through the window.

I imagined the slide slow for relatives later:

“At 9:50, I flew through this cloud. … See this cloud? We flew through this one at 10:05. … This cloud here, this is really great — 10:17…..”

When she wasn’t doing this, she had her Kindle reader fired up. So that she could play Angry Birds.

What was it again that drove Sylvia Plath to suicide before “The Bell Jar” could even be published? Had she lived, this bookless experience would have killed her.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2014 at 8:52 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.