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Wendell Berry on flying
By admin | August 6, 2007
Here are some reflections from the American essayist, Wendell Berry, on boarding a plane from America to visit family in Ireland.
“For me, air travel always has about it an insistent feeling of unreality. I feel that I am where I do not belong, with a totally arbitrary assemblage of other people who do not belong there either. And though I am as much in a hurry as everybody else, I always feel that I am going too fast – incomprehensibly fast. It is as though I am being hurried through a time that is destined to remain a simple blank in my life. And the insistence in the voices of captain and crew that this experience is perfectly ordinary only intensifies the suggestion of unreality. To eat one’s supper 35,000 feet in the air at a speed of 450 miles per hour is an experience that I have never become prepared for. To sleep at such a height and speed is even more improbable. I always wake from such a sleep in the surprise of fearful realisation, such as must have been felt in the old days by those who woke knowing that they had been ridden through the sky all night by a witch.â€
(From: Home Economics: Fourteen Essays by Wendell Berry).
Topics: Flying Feels Wrong |
August 16th, 2007 at 9:37 am
This post reminds me of a friend who had a theory that flying somewhere was ‘cheating’, or stealing time. She thought that you would eventually pay for living fast and travelling so far so quickly. The time saved from flying would be equal to the time your life expectancy shortnened! Live fast, die young…. live slow, live longer…
October 14th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
The perceived ‘need’ to buzz around thw world at ever-increasing speed and frequency is the chief reason for our present wars:
http://home.btconnect.com/tipiglen/hypermobility.html
I’m pleased you are aware of Wendell. Try here for more prescient wisdom:
http://home.btconnect.com/tipiglen/berry.txt
Salaam/Shalom/Shanthi/Dorood/Peace
Namaste -ed
October 14th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
Also from Wendell on flying:
“Berry’s wife Tanya, a graceful, purposeful woman from a family of artists, with a pretty face and calm green eyes, leans into the room from the kitchen with a newspaper in her hand. She says something to Berry about the funding for NASA being cut. Berry looks satisfied and replies that he thinks this is a good move.
I decide to probe Berry about his attitudes on the widely accepted virtues of the view of fragile Earth from space. Berry has a certain puckish grin when he is out to puncture some popular icon, which spreads across his face as he drawls, “That view didn’t do much for me; it looked like a poor old Christmas ornament.” I ask him if he doesn’t find, as I do, the experience of flying over a piece of country particularly beautiful and enlightening about, say, the geology, hydrology, vegetation patterns and so on. Berry chuckles.
“Tanya will tell you about me and flying. As soon as that thing takes off, I’d just as soon lie down in the aisle between the seats like an old dog (pronounced “dawg”) and go to sleep until it’s over.”
Then he looks at me and, a little more seriously now, polishes his argument.
“Let’s say you were from somewhere else, seeing this Earth from space for the first time. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t be satisfied with that view; I’d want to get closer, walk around on it, even get down on my hands and knees. That’s how I prefer to see the Earth.”
http://arts.envirolink.org/interviews_and_conversations/WendellBerry.html
Salaam, etc. - ed (who hasn’t flown in more than a decade)
October 14th, 2007 at 10:05 pm
Every Friday from 5:30 to 7:30 A group of residents on the Toronto waterfront demonstrate against the expanding City Centre Airport on Toronto Island. Last week, October 6, marked one year of weekly demonstrations. We count planes, cars, taxiis, busses, small planes, and Helicopters and attempt to measure the amount of CO2 dropped on the adjacent residential communities which are located as close as 300 meters from a runway!
We play percussion and sound insturments and carry pickets in an effort to bring attention to the catastrophic activity. It’s a tough assignment. Every one still feels they have a right to fly even if it destroys surrounding residential uses.