There is something just incredibly wrong and depressing, almost apocalyptical, about going into a nine-hour flight without a single book inside your bag.

It is quite easy to look inside an airplane and see it as a microcosm for the global tableau of cultural differences and historical baggage.

On an Air France jet, for instance, the Americans are listening to their iPods for eight hours straight, watching “Jarhead” or playing video games while everyone else is reading.

The Americans are endlessly talking about themselves: what they bought in Paris, what they will buy in Paris, what they already own so they don’t need to acquire and, mostly, avoiding any sort of abstract subject that may force them to verbalize that which cannot be touched.

Sitting right behind me is a family from Illinois (the mom, the dad and the two blond daughters). They are all playing games on their private monitors and talking loudly like this is a space they share with no one else. They accept not a second of silence.

One of the daughters is playing “Who Wants to be a Millionaire,” so she keeps asking the parents (the dad, really) which is the right answer for every question.

I realize that no matter what level of intellect one’s father has, one inevitably thinks of their parent as a know-it-all hero. And that is perfectly natural, and healthy. But this father knows none of the answers. In fact, he has never heard of Edgar Allan Poe and thinks the Irish Prime Minister is named Tony Blair.

Still, the daughter keeps asking, as if saying to herself, “If my dad doesn’t know, no one knows.” And she gets frustrated each time. Eventually the mother asks, “Why don’t you choose the cards game in there?” And she does.

There is something just incredibly wrong and depressing, almost apocalyptical, about going into a nine-hour flight without a single book inside your bag. Or perhaps with a Dan Brown novel to keep on nourishing the dangerous idea that reading anything is better than not reading at all.

I try to imagine myself inside this blond girl’s skin, pathologically putting on lip balm and neurotically searching for her Ugg boots underneath my seat. “I, like, don’t have enough space,” she tells me, as if expecting someone to renounce their own space in order to grant her more of it.

But the truth is I simply cannot fathom what it must feel like to be the offspring of a father who knows nothing outside of Home Depot, and a mother who has never loved a book, who has never chosen a book.

This American aversion toward the figurative, the world of ideas, denounces its counterbalancing, neurotic relationship with the opposite of the abstract: the body, the most inescapably obvious of all earthly things.

The body and its accessories. All the physicality one can get until he or she reaches the point where the intangible is pointless.

So there they were, the blond family that believes in the Irish parliament of Tony Blair, waiting for their luggage in carrousel No. 5. Taking out their overstuffed Louis Vuitton bags (possibly the tackiest airport item a person can haul) with their poorly manicured hands, proving the theory that says, “If you have to actually show it, it’s ’cause you ain’t that sure you got it.”

They keep on loading up their cart with bags and bags and bags. You would think that if you can afford a real Louis Vuitton valise, you would have traveled enough to know that only the provincial, the non-well-traveled, take more than carry-on.

So I leave the carrousel and they are still there, anxiously waiting, perhaps even praying, for their final bags to come.

And I think of Guillaume Dustan, who said that we worry so much about what we have, what we own, because we have nothing to say.

As I drive home I pass by the Wisconsin sex shops, relegated to far away suburbs, discreet parts of the freeway decor. And I remember going into one once and witnessing the unimaginable, the self-torturing embodiment of the way America sees and deals with its body: a 30-something, average-looking male, wedding band on, staring at pornographic images on a small screen in a door-less stall, where a big sign read: “Do not touch others or yourself.”

All the perversions in the world, at a distance, all the allusions to pleasurable experience you can afford, as long as it doesn’t actually take place — as long as it remains locked in the realm of possibilities, in the realm of abstractions.

We, in America, use the realm of abstractions to dump all of the threatening anxieties we can’t handle so they can stay there in no contact with the multiplying nature of actual ideas, suffocate and die. Like they aren’t what actually move us.

And that Kenosha sex shop, a masochistic experience in its own right (look, but don’t touch), reminds me of Le Depot, the nightclub in Paris where you can choose between a dance floor level and a labyrinthine basement with lockable stalls and backrooms.

At Le Depot you pay seven Euros and 50 cents to look, touch and do everything else an adult chooses to do with his sexuality and individual freedom. Where an adult is an adult, not a natural-born criminal waiting to come out and under constant erotic surveillance.

You can buy poppers in a vending machine, get condoms and lubricant from the “condiment” aisles and go round and round until you cross eyes with a willing soul.

Here the sexual is allowed a kind of liberty that I am not sure humans know how to handle. Instead of “don’t touch yourself” signs, you see “protect yourself” ones.

Along with dozens of monitors showing dozens of pornos to the sound of incredibly good electro-clash, which makes even barebacking seem glamorous, or at least, harmless.

And here I think of Guillaume Dustan again, who, if it wasn’t for the megalomaniac arrogance and irresponsible stances, would be the most important philosopher of the ’00s.

He says nightclubs are underrated as places of worship, places of inducing meditation. The only spaces where we allow ourselves to move our bodies in the most absurd of ways without feeling ridiculous or castrated. Spaces where we inadvertently take a stance against the anti-experience, anti-body, anti-sex, anti-life Judeo-Christian society of ours.

And he dreams of a time when anything that makes you hard or wet is permissible, and that the only limit is violence against someone who doesn’t want it.

Essentially a world where we have all read Marguerite Duras, we have all been psychoanalyzed and witnessed the kind of misery that makes man comprehend things well.

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