Would that
Thomas Wolfe had experienced the thrill and glory of
air travel! With what poetic
prose, with what marvelous
language, with what
passion, with what nonchalant
command, with what
love, with what exuberant
idealism, with what idealistic naïvete, with what turns of phrase, with what
minute description, with what
exultant and
lyrical words, with what utter
madness, with what
mastery, with what
fire, would he, could he, could he alone, describe the anticipatory thrill those precious moments before take-off, the gut-wrenching separation of
wheel and
earth, the
Icarean rise through the blue
atmosphere and white clouds, the look on a six-year-old's face -- so similar to that look on his own face -- as the boy looks down like a
king on the land he will someday rule, the
pitiable boredom of
a businessman on his tenth flight in two months, the roar of the engines underneath the wing to his left, the inane chatter of three
college students across the aisle to his right, the soft-spoken
lullaby of a
mother in front of him, the harsh and tired
reprimands of a
mother behind him and the
grandmother's gentle reminder of the child's tender age, the powerfully
masculine voice of the
captain as he informs us effortlessly of the
miracles he is performing (
flight!), the
manswarm of four states reduced to
microscopic size, the lonely farmhouse surrounded on all sides by acres of
desolate land,
the lake,
the river,
Lake Michigan,
Lake Ronkonkoma,
Lake Erie,
Lake Champlain,
Lake Huron,
Lake Okeechobee,
Lake Superior,
Mono Lake,
Crater Lake,
Lake Ontario, Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg (
Webster Lake), or
Clear Lake, the
Hudson River,
the Willamette,
the Snake,
the Altamaha,
the Brazos,
the Kenai,
the Klamath,
the Red,
the White,
the Merrimack,
the Yampa,
the Chicago,
the Eno,
the Santa Cruz,
the Missouri,
the Ohio,
the Lehigh,
the Verde,
the Charles,
the Delaware,
the Cumberland,
the Colorado,
the Blanco,
the Apalachicola,
the Rio Grande, or
the Mississippi -- mightiest river of all, untamed,
furious yet
calm, raging, flowing, driving, carrying, freighting, tugging, the river by which we
set our
clocks, of which we
dream, from whose
romantic power we can never
escape -- the lights of a small town at
dusk, the lights of
Chicago at 9:15 PM, the million Elm Streets and
Interstates intertwining like
veins under a sky so
blue he could feel it caress the
airplane,
Walt Whitman's
vision seen through the window of an airplane,
Mark Twain and
Herman Melville and
Richard Wright incarnated at thirty thousand feet, and the blackness -- the blackness of a
night under which nobody walks, the blackness of our
fears, the blackness of a
sleepless 3:00 AM, the blackness of a
digital clock gone
blank, the blackness of ten thousand unrealized dreams and ten million lost hopes, the blackness of Dylan's "
North Country Blues", the blackness of
everything man regrets being capable of, the blackness of some
chasm in the middle of
America and of man's
heart, the blackness of
hunger, of
desire, and of stopping at nothing to
satiate those two, the blackness of some forgotten
highway, the blackness of a doorway in which a family is sleeping in
Omaha, the blackness of
Hawaii,
Florida, and
Montana, the blackness of
poverty living next door to
avarice in
Salt Lake City, the blackness of
Des Moines and
Sheboygan, the blackness of
white-collar crime in
Austin, TX, the blackness of an
ignorant opulence, the blackness of
cowardly expatriation, the blackness of a
midnight voyage down the
Mississippi River -- the blackness of
America!
In other news, no one who downvoted me can handle Thomas Wolfe.