i was reading wind, sand and stars by antoine de saint-exupery earlier today. it’s a memoir regarding his work as a pilot for an airmail company in the 1920s/30s. i stopped after only 20 pages or so because the visual imagery was too strong and beautiful for me to take very much of in one sitting.
Thus, when Mermoz first crossed the South Atlantic in a hydroplane, as day was dying he ran foul of the Black Hole region, off Africa. Straight ahead of him were the tails of tornadoes rising minute by minute gradually higher, rising as a wall is built; and then the night came down upon these preliminaries and swallowed them up; and when, an hour later, he slipped under the clouds, he came out into a fantastic kingdom.
Great black waterspouts had reared themselves seemingly in the immobility of temple pillars. Swollen at their tops, they were supporting the squat and lowering arch of the tempest, but through the rifts in the arch there fell slabs of light and the full moon sent her radiant beams between the pillars down upon the frozen tiles of the sea. Through these uninhabited ruins Mermoz made his way, gliding slantwise from one channel of light to the next, circling round those giant pillars in which there must have rumbled the upsurge of the sea, flying for four hours through these corridors of moonlight toward the exit from the temple. And this spectacle was so overwhelming that only after he had got through the Black Hole did Mermoz awaken to the fact that he had not been afraid.
another passage, regarding losing their bearings and going way off course, burning through their fuel and desperately trying to figure out where to land:
But the airports one by one had been waking each other up. Into our dialogue broke the voices of Agadir, Casablanca, Dakar. The radio stations at each of these towns had warned the airports and the ports had flashed the news to our comrades. Bit by bit they were gathering round us as round a sick-bed. Vain warmth, but human warmth after all. Helpless concern, but affectionate at any rate.
And suddenly into this conclave burst Toulouse, the headquarters of the Line three thousand miles away, worried along with the rest. Toulouse broke in without a word of greeting, simply to say sharply: “Your reserve tanks bigger than standard. You have two hours fuel left. Proceed to Cisneros.”
it reminded me vividly of sky odyssey, one of my favorite video games (i recently passed along my english copy on here). immediately after reading that second passage i quoted, i put the book down and ordered a copy of sky odyssey of my japanese ps2.
sky odyssey is so wonderful to me because it takes place in a small group of islands with isolated human settlements and remnants of ancient and abandoned human settlements. the terrain is very dramatic and riddled with canyons, caves, waterfalls, mountains, and all sorts of interesting things. there’s even a level that reminds me slightly of the first passage i quoted .
obviously the game takes a lot of liberties with both geography and physics, but just reading a bit of st-exupery’s book made it clear that in some ways it’s not extremely far from the reality of what many people experienced. and what they experienced is so temporal, borne of not only their own lives but also the state the world was in during their life. no one will ever again have the experience of flying mail from france to south america, operating with only your visuals and manual instrumentation, carrying the thoughts and feelings and ideas of hundreds of people in your cargo and passing through a world above the clouds that very few humans had experienced at that point in time. even if you retraced the route in a similar aircraft, everything from the regulations to the scenery would be so, so different in 2016 than it was in 1930.
and, just as an example, the first quoted passage is something i would love to have experienced. and i can’t. but maybe i can get a taste of it.
fortunately, memories can be preserved and shared. obviously writing is one of the biggest ways – it’s how i learned about mermoz’s experience and how i’m sharing my thoughts on it with you. it can also be passed along visually – although it wouldn’t have been possible with the technology of the time, the experience can be preserved in a photograph. and there is nothing stopping anyone at any point from drawing, painting, etc. a picture or pictures of the experience, whether it’s the person who experienced it themselves or someone hearing about it.