Modern Living: The City of Flight

In her novel In Transit, Brigid Brophy visualizes the whole modern world as an airport waiting room, calling it, "a droplet of the twentieth century; pure, isolated, rare twentieth century." She must have been thinking of Paris' Orly Airport. When they land at Orly, tourists are only 14 miles from the heart of Paris. But before they depart for the city, they might do well to look around. If they do, they will discover why 3,200,000 people came to Orly last year, a million more than visited the Eiffel Tower—not to fly, but simply...