095: Why Do Humans Want to Fly?
It strikes me as I stand in the house of airplanes, flying contraptions, and dreamful flights: humans have always wanted to fly. They have climbed to the tops of trees, scaled mountains, and stared into the hunting clouds of the blue heavens, wondering why birds and butterflies were blessed with the ability to drift on winds without a solid earth-bound thing to keep them afloat. Watching the feathered and shimmering wings, they must have felt trapped, hostages of a biological construct that kept them chained to the soil, like any other common beast.
And so they dreamed. Gods, akin in shape to themselves, sprouted wings from their feet and sprinted through the clouds, or rode winged chariots pulled by wingéd horses. Some shape-shifted to escape the constraints of their humanly form, while others used the technological approach.
Da Vinci's designs for human wings, bat-like in their shape, spread out before me. I see the photos and videos of Victorian and Edwardian men with contraptions of flight strapped to their backs and arms, or to bicycles which they need to propel forward to escape their chains. The only one that comes even close to flying is the one who fires himself from a canon. What must he have felt, those seconds in which he was airborne, before gravity seized him? Elation? Delight? Fear?
I wander on to see the first airplanes, wooden in their structures, with tight cloth and propellers, and space for only one. Goggles and helmets dangle from their wings.
In the end we were all Icaruses, weren't we.
Written by: Katrine H. (@katrinehjulstad)
And so they dreamed. Gods, akin in shape to themselves, sprouted wings from their feet and sprinted through the clouds, or rode winged chariots pulled by wingéd horses. Some shape-shifted to escape the constraints of their humanly form, while others used the technological approach.
Da Vinci's designs for human wings, bat-like in their shape, spread out before me. I see the photos and videos of Victorian and Edwardian men with contraptions of flight strapped to their backs and arms, or to bicycles which they need to propel forward to escape their chains. The only one that comes even close to flying is the one who fires himself from a canon. What must he have felt, those seconds in which he was airborne, before gravity seized him? Elation? Delight? Fear?
I wander on to see the first airplanes, wooden in their structures, with tight cloth and propellers, and space for only one. Goggles and helmets dangle from their wings.
In the end we were all Icaruses, weren't we.
Written by: Katrine H. (@katrinehjulstad)
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