Thursday
We arrived safely in the Atlanta airport yesterday and are now safely ensconced in Buford, Georgia, where Toby, Candice, and their four children live. When I think of flying, I am often put in mind of the protagonist’s sad discovery at an early age in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon:
When the little boy discovered, at four, the same thing Mr. Smith had learned earlier, that only birds and airplanes could fly, he lost all interest in himself. To have to live without that single gift saddened him”
Flight, as I’ve noted in a previous post, is an important theme in Morrison’s novel, and by the end of the book Milkman has indeed found a way to fly. I share today, however, a more positive take on airplanes:
High Flight (An Airman’s Ecstasy)
By John Gillespie Magee
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air . . .Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or ever eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
Ronald Reagan quoted the final line after the Challenger disaster, and Magee suffered a similar fate, dying from a mid-air collision. While my flight over didn’t evoke quite the same ecstasy in me that it does in Magee—I didn’t, for instance, feel as though I touched the face of God—nevertheless flying continues to thrill me every time I’m in the air.
Now, following our encounter with the delirious burning blue, we just have to recover from jet lag.