More Escalator Musings

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I know I am a little obsessive about popes and escalators. I cannot help it. To ride an escalator is to live for a few moments in the lap of luxury. Riding an escalator is the closest most of us will get to the world we envision we would live in should we happen to win the lottery.

(If context matters to you, and hopefully it doesn't, or you could not possible enjoy visiting my site, all this flipped through my head coming up the escalator in the bus tunnel at the Westlake Mall station this morning.)

On an escalator, you just stand there, looking around, observing, taking the world in, not moving a muscle, not exerting yourself in any way whatsoever. You just stand there. Maybe during the rest of your non-escalating life, you think, "sheesh! Why do I have to walk like a sucker from here to there. Why can't the world come to me?"

But that is exactly what happens on escalators. On escalators, the mountain truly comes to Mohammad. The world slides gracefully by, and at a nice slow pace so that you can take in even the smallest details of how the panels are attached to the ceilings or whatnot. It is just like my vision of being rich, except that I am not lying like a slob on my couch while the world parades slowly by, bringing good stuff and chocolate to me.

Plus, you are always moving up, up, up on an escalator. That is why escalators are so much more powerful than the moving walkways at airports. The moving walkways are also quite cool, but they are very utilitarian. They belong to the masses. Everyone rides along the same plane. It is pleasant, but hardly awe inspiring. Whereas escalators, they carry you both forward and up. You leave the earthly behind. You rise above the heads of your fellow men and are lifted away from all their sordid concerns and the mess of the toppled rack that
you left in aisle four.

There is not an ideology in the world which is left unsatisfied by escalators. You are moving forward -- the protestant ethic, you are moving up -- through any class system you care to choose, you are moving forward and up at the same time -- it is the American Dream. It is Zen. It is Manifest Destiny. It is the Perfectability of Man.

For the time that you are on the escalator, you receive all that at no cost of any actual effort. But, like all good drugs, it soon drops you off at the next plateau and that escalator will never take you any higher than that first trip, leaving you wanting more, back among a fresh batch of people that, despite your innate optimism, may turn out to be no better or may be even worse than the lot you left behind.

Also like drugs in the sense of setting you on the path to financial ruin, in that so many escalators are in malls or stores. As a(notparticularly)n interesting aside, while I was in London, I did a lot of my shopping at the Sainsburys in Camden Town, because they had about the only bread in London that I really
liked.

The supermarket had a walkway non-escalator thing -- basically one of those airport walkways, but at a gentle incline, to take you up to the next level of the store. It was fun in that the walkway was vaguely bouncy, but it was ultimately unsatisfying.

I think the stairs are an integral aspect of the escalator experience. They digitize your engagement with the escalator and its otherwise analog ride. They make your moment very discreet, and grant a little three-square-foot parcel of property to you for the time that you are there. There is ownership of your step on an escalator, whereas on a slidewalk, there are no boundaries, and your ascent into heaven is held in common with all those around you.

Do not even get me started on the fun of walking backwards down the stairs on an escalator. If you do it smoothly enough, it is as if you are hovering.

- - -

I notice, as I re-read this, that I am pretty exclusively thinking about escalators going up.

The truth is, I do not enjoy escalators going down nearly as much. Maybe it was those Loony Toon cartoons that I was exposed to as a child, where Daffy or someone is not allowed to take the escalator to heaven, but must instead get on the escalator down into hell, with the darkening reds and the rising flames and the cackling devil.

Combine that with later readings of Dante's Inferno, which was more comic than frightening, but which forced me to realize how many of those sins I was already guilty of, and perhaps it is no surprise that I love taking escalators up, but would always prefer to take an elevator down.