[lit-ideas] Re: Aaaaaargh

  • From: "Mike Geary" <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 11:47:36 -0500

US:

Beautiful, Eric. Thanks.


I second that emotion.

Mike Geary



Eric Yost wrote:

>>Really you should get out and enjoy life.

A while back, I did a lot of flying and was changed by the experience. Sitting in a plane at 40,000 feet, watching the sun rise golden on the steel gray waters of the Atlantic, all the vast world below, medium-sized cities looking like computer chips with moss growing at the edges -- it became clear how little I knew about anything, how small my imagination was, how limited my understanding of the complexity of the world.

I return to my apartment, sit at a desk in a small room, turn on the computer, and get immersed in the positioned news statements of competing factions. Back in that small world, the insight of the plane retreats a bit, all the interminable crises and bickering seem larger, the pessimism about the world returns -- slowly and surely I grow a carapace, my shell, my world view. My little, little world view.

Then it's flying time again. As the jet circles out of La Guardia, the squalor of Queens organizes into grid patterns of unimaginable complexity. The jet passes over my neighborhood.

Down there's my apartment, I think, that place where I have my world view. My opinions. My anxiety about the destruction of culture. It all seems so important at my desk. What a tiny world down there.


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