Lately, I've been doing a lot of work-related flying. Jet trips
up and down the East Coast. Two or three miles up in a
pressurized box traveling at 500 miles per hour. At this
altitude, the towns and cities look like computer chips with red
and green moss (forests) growing around them.
I demand window seats and spend most of the flight looking out
the window. Would be nice to fly in a glass-bottom plane as far
as I'm concerned. Make that a glass-walled plane too, to see the
sunrise over the Atlantic, the ocean like brushed steel, the
stars in the West.
There's not much factual knowledge in this activity but there is
some insight. As a result of this activity I am convinced that
everything we believe is wrong, impossibly small, relentlessly
local. Our ego is a reverie in small rooms.
Th world is so large, so unimaginably complex, so completely out
of personal control. I don't even understand my apartment
building, let alone a scale where cities are reduced to computer
chips with moss growing around them.
Politics has no role in such a scale. Imagination has no role in
such a scale. Sympathy cannot penetrate an order of existence
where one could cup a small city in a hand pressed against a
window. Power is a drunken dream. All thoughts are humbling and
the only judgment is awe.
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