Aporia

I had fallen asleep, but somehow had not slept. I played with my eyelids, felt their lashes touch, measured the fading of what little light remained as they came close to closing; several times, they shut themselves totally, as if against my will, and I felt myself fade away again. When I woke, it seemed incredible to me that my unconscious hours should be precisely as inscrutable, confusing, and difficult as my days. At no activity is the mind natural, at ease; in no moment is it peaceable or ours to control.

I was on an airplane on a very long flight, slumped ungratefully against a multi-paned window as cold as the deep, blue atmosphere I could see in the night sky beyond. It seemed to me that I was the only passenger still awake, but I was protected from loneliness by solicitous attendants softly undertaking their missions into the cabin: someone would press a button as they felt a little need, and someone in a uniform trimmed just-so would arrive to help them, and we were all miles away from the filth and decay of the earth. It was the paradise of a science-fiction story.

Brain thrummed into vacuity by the roar of jets sustained for seven hours, my mind was wildly, rapturously open: every thought resonated, and every sight, too. Knots of sodium-vapour lights appeared beneath thin sheets of cloud, beyond which their orange and white glow could be seen to possess the regularity and order that is the hallmark of our species. At other times, the world I know was replaced by a planet not yet settled: enormous mountain ranges larger than any on Earth stretched for what seemed to be thousands and thousands of miles, for hours and then tens of hours; I thought I saw snow drifts, then saw that they were clouds, then saw beneath the clouds to snow drifts; I saw barrenness that one cannot fathom, emptiness of a scope never witnessed in our native world, and I felt the chill of that angry desolation gasping as our plane shot through it, inhaling our warmth from us, trying to achieve our diffusion across its expanse.

What could be more beautiful than a city -the maximal physical expression of humanity on the plane of our natural evolution and daily existence- seen from the sky, seen as gods see it? Only a city seen at night, illuminated by its practical determination: the rotation of our planet will not slow us, deter us, scare us. And because we’ve made it, the light produced by tens of thousands of lamps along boulevards and around the rims of enormous stadiums has a special beauty that even the sun lacks: the beauty of intentionality, of desire addressed, of purpose fulfilled, of mind instantiated.

Inside the cabin I saw the charm of hundreds of individually glowing electronic devices, most patiently awaiting their own waking from sleep. Their little diodes sweetly, blandly expressed contended servility: use me before I die.

I thought of the disintegration of the plane, of hurtling out into the freezing night; I imagined seeing other passengers in the air: from even a few hundred yards, in this oceanic darkness, with the screaming wind in my ears, they’d be invisible to me: silly, spindly black forms against a blue-black sky, rotating stars above and nothing identifiable below: just what one knows implacably awaits. Because I was only thinking of it, I felt the thrill of freedom and not the fall that was that freedom; I pretended falling was flying; I didn’t think about the ground, not at all.