Landings: From Below and From Above

The sight of a plane coming in to land almost always sends chills down my spine. Though it’s one of the most common sights, and the world has been blasé about air travel for over a century now, I still find the idea of hundreds of tons of metal, materials and people floating in the air totally awe-inspiring. Seeing it relatively up close like I often do from our new place, you can truly appreciate its splendor. You have to marvel at the scale of it…try pushing a large piece of furniture, and you realize just how inconsequential our little fleshy frame is against the solidity of all that springs out of earth. You look at the sheer heft of the airplane– much greater than the chunkiest cranes one sees on a worksite – and you realize the magic of it. You have to just imagine an 18 wheeler crane floating in the air, to appreciate where the chill and child-like wonder comes from. And all this made possible through the ingenuity endowed in a little mass of gray tissue housed in a small bony shell.

I have a similar fascination with landings even as a passenger, sitting on a window seat of a plane as it over-flies towns and villages on its final approach. It is such a delicious treat to the imagination to first see what appears to be little more than a sterile, dun-colored splotch from above, and then reflect on the dense tangle of human stories, histories, joys, sorrows, anguish, and aspirations that must lie within its beguiling stillness. I love picking out individual houses and then imagining life within them…how utterly removed from my world, yet how full of human drama their stories must be…the families, relationships, and struggles. Every tiny doll-house must be packed solid with layer-over-layer of human experience and emotion.

And yet from above, it all looks so unremarkable and humdrum. I think of the blazing, lurid headlines in the news (thanks to an eternal fascination with the crime section of newspapers) that testify to the depravity that humans are prone to, and then wonder at how deceivingly placid it all seems from above. It’s like the “beautiful calm of hysterical people” as Maureen Dowd put it in one of her recent NYT pieces, or Edwin Arlington’s Richard Cory, that quiet, respectable man, who “went home and put a bullet through his head”. So hard to reconcile the utter stillness one sees in the drab spot from an altitude, with one’s knowledge of the raging forces of life flowing through it…the explosive irrationality simmering under the calm surface of the bourgeois world.