THE DREAM OF FLYING
As a boy, I dreamed I might one day fly like superman. He was faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. For starters, I thought I’d have a go at flying.
One day I draped a large bath towel around my shoulders as a cape, stood on the radiator of my room, drew my arms over my head, and with an “up, up, and away,” lunged forward. I dropped like a stone onto the bed, bounced once, landed on the floor and broke my arm. I did not enjoy my flight. My mother grounded me even after the cast was removed. My dream of flying came to an ignominious end.
Over a thousand years ago, in Malmesbury, England, a young Benedictine monk named Oliver yearned to fly and was the first man believed to have actually flown. The documentation of his adventure is credible although sketchy. Leaping from a parapet, he flew 690 feet straight down, crashed, breaking both legs, crippling him for life. Oliver had arranged devices like wings on his arms and body. His chronicler, William of Malmesbury, wrote that Oliver thought he failed “because he forgot to put a tail in the back.”
Brother Oliver, severely crippled, never ceased wondering about the mystery of the universe and how it must be to soar among the stars. From his cell, his brothers brought him outside nightly so he might stare upward and wonder at the heavens. He may have failed to fly, but the dream never died.
What is it about the firmament of heaven that awakens yearning, a hunger, a feeling of awe? My guess is that it serves as a metaphor. We yearn to break through the constraints of our lives, to transcend our limits, and be “as free as a bird.”
Only the soul, our ancient forebears thought, was meant to fly. At death, our souls ascended to heaven on a one-way flight. God, they also believed, had assigned only angels and spirits (including witches) an ability to fly. Whether we had any business up there at all made even the boldest adventurers uneasy lest by their pride they’d offend God.
Attempts to fly included using feathered wings, balloons, and kites. In the 16th century, one Chinese man, Wan-Hoo, considered flying by propulsion and secured seven gunpowder rockets to a sedan chair. His servants lit them. The chronicle reads: “Smoke, an explosion, and Wan- Hoo was no more.”
In 1996, I read an essay on the history of flying. I was surprised to learn that the technology for flying was available hundreds of years before Brother Oliver and Wann-Hu ever attempted their flights.
Covering skeletal wooden frames with skins and animal membranes was practiced routinely. Building a glider was feasible. They wanted for the technology only because they looked for the secret of flying in the wrong place. They modeled their efforts watching low flying birds like sparrows. These birds flapped their wings to fly leading the aspiring flyers to believe that flapping wings were the key to flight. They hadn’t looked high enough to study the raptors. Hawks can glide for miles on steadied wings. Oliver’s attempts failed because he set his sights set too low.
Today we’re awash in technological achievements. We have pintles and gudgeons galore – mostly electronic. In years past, dreams of possibilities abounded, but the technology to realize the dreams was lacking. It seems that just the opposite is happening in our day; the technologies are abundant, but our dreams have become limited, even mediocre. We don’t look very high.
I read recently about the planning of the “Hyperloop” by billionaire Elon Musk. According to the Daily Mail, he plans to shoot capsules filled with passengers along a tube at around the speed of sound. Once the technology is worked out it would take just thirty minutes to travel 381 miles from Los Angeles to San Francisco. The technology is just around the corner, but I wonder just what dream is the technology serving? What’s the hurry? I assume the dream is to get us where we’re going much faster. One complaint in my life is the unnerving speed at which everything is happening. Some days I hardly take time to smell flowers.
What’s important in life is an ongoing question: is it more important to reach our destination than it is to live deeply into the experience we have in getting there? It’s curious to imagine, but if the Hyperloop becomes a reality and we could travel that fast, we might get to San Francisco in a flash, but see nothing along the way including any flowers. We’d be traveling in a hermetically sealed tube with no view of the outside and hardly time to converse with fellow travel companions. And if, in that half hour, we were seated next to someone we might chat with, the chances are he’d be on a cell phone or an ipad, two of the crown jewels dreamed up in our electronic age.
Humankind has been dreaming about universal peace and justice for centuries . . . usually after we’ve won a war. The dream fades and we’re back to another war. Maybe we’re not looking high enough.
Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.
Howard McCoy says
We are so goal oriented as a species. Graduate from high school, get a job and a car, buy a house. Be a success in all we do. But, you know, it’s not just the goal that’s important. The path we travel along towards those goals is every bit as important if not even more important. That path we’re traveling consists of moments that we’re alive, and to be perfectly honest, that’s all we really have. Those moments on the path, those moments that make up the present, those inhalations and exhalations, are really all we have. You could step off the curb on the corner of High Street today and be killed by a car. So much for all those goals. Yes, have those goals, but don’t forget to breathe along the way and embrace the present. The future will be there when you get there. Don’t get there too fast. You’ll miss the present. That’s where you reside.