How, and from where, we look

How, and from where, we look.  From above, at three thousand feet above the town, soaring through the clouds and piercing them with the nose of the great machine we are riding, the world looks wondrous, all the way up to ten thousand feet.  But it’s the clouds that look most wondrous, in their expanse of pillowy stillness, draped over the earth like so many striated and multi-shaped blankets.  The human world, the town below–how paltry!  While it is sublime to see the way that world is chopped up into squares and segments, segments for agriculture, segments for apartment buildings, segments for stores and warehouses, there are so many lines and blocks of these things that a being from above would gather of the human race that we are no more than shoppers or sleepers or workers.  It’s hard, in other words, getting a sense of our dreams from up here, save in the wonder of the machine from which we look at it, save for the wonder that we trust such a human-made thing with all of our lives.