I recently flew home for Thanksgiving, down to Charleston from DC. I do try to enjoy the miracle of flight. Walk into a room and sit down. They close the door. Two hours pass. You stand up and they open the door. You're in a new city, a new country. Sit down for seventeen hours and Chicago becomes Delhi. Remarkable. Caracas becomes Miami, becomes Lucerne. Journeys that would have taken months, years, fly by (sorry) in a matter of hours. We went from feet to hooves to carriages to trains to cars to planes. What will the next breakthrough be? Our last step cut an eight hour car ride into a hour-plus flight. Will the next step proportionally reduce an hour-long flight into a seven and a half minute trip?
Numbed by our Blackberrys and the safety pantomime before takeoff, I think we've lost our sense of wonder at air travel, that we are in this metal tube blasting along in the ether at hundreds of miles an hour. I think about the math going on, the physics going on in the moment of takeoff. I wish I could see it. I wish I could look out the window and see the formulas and fractions flying by. Air pressure, wind velocity, thrust, gravity on the hull, friction on the tires, the weight of the passengers and their tubes of toothpaste in their carry-on luggage, the wind resistance and the aerodynamics. The tympani roll of the plane slowly gathering speed, the rumbling over the runway, the moment where the nose lifts, the pressure forces you down into your seat, and then the mystic moment when the back wheels no longer touch the earth. Upward thrust under the wings has exceeded the force of gravity. We are airborne.
I flew back to DC at night, over the Eastern seaboard, across South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia. I had a window seat.
As we fly over our planet, I look down at the flecks of illumination in the inky sea of darkness below, the bright dabs and swirls, the luminescent dots and lines, these spiraling galaxies of white and orange and pale green lights in the blackness. The landscape below is bristling with light, sometimes lethargically, sometimes enthusiastically. The densely packed light in the distance weakens as it spreads out from its core, the steaming orange fallout from the light pollution atom bomb of a town.
I wonder what we are passing over: what is the name of this town? Is this the Walmart? The Moore's house? The Jiffy Lube? New Bethlehem Baptist Church? The Krogers? My generality at this distance above is countered by the real specificity of what is below.
It's basically uninterrupted. Shopping malls, roads, clusters of subdivisions and cul-de-sacs, parking lots and warehouses. It is not as bare and primeval as you would think it would be. Has sprawl consumed the whole world? Where are the back woods, the mountain cottages for our Thoreaus and shramanas (if there are any left)? I remember that amazing view of the Earth from space, the image of "the world at night" where it's so clear how everything east of the Mississippi is a broad and spidery web of stars, linked together by fine filaments and strands, some of the lights glowing hot and bright and white, these little incendiary stars, our cities laid out in constellations on the Earth's surface.
Are we copying the heavens? Are we laying on the Earth's surface our image of ourselves? Are we mocking the old constellations of crab and twins and bull? Praising them? What are the constellations we are making, in these lines between Tuscon and Birmingham and Charlotte and New Orleans? The Grande Latte? The Failed Marriage? The iPad 2? The Traffic Jam?
The ancients looked up at the heavens and counted the stars in awe, marking lines between them and seeing in the cosmos familiar forms from our planet. We moderns have done the opposite - we have looked down at our planet and painted it with lines of light and stars of our own invention. We have made constellations. We have created our own cosmos.
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