"At night, on guard, staring into the dark, they were carried away by jumbo
jets.
They felt the rush of takeoff Gone! they yelled. And then velocity,
wings and engines, a smiling stewardess-but it was more than a plane, it was a
real bird, a big sleek silver bird with feathers and talons and high screeching.
They were flying. The weights fell off; there was nothing to bear. They laughed
and held on tight, feeling the cold slap of wind and altitude, soaring, thinking
It's over, I'm gone! - they were naked. They were light and free-it was
all lightness, bright and fast and buoyant, light as light, a helium buzz in the
brain, a giddy bubbling in the lungs as they were taken up over the Clouds and
the war, beyond duty, beyond gravity and mortification anti global entanglements
-Sin loi! They yelled, I'm sorry, motherfuckers, but I'm out of it,
I'm goofed, I'm on a space cruise, I'm gone! -and it was a restful,
disencumbered sensation, just riding the light waves, sailing; that big silver
freedom bird over the mountains and oceans, over America, over the farms and
great sleeping cities and cemeteries and highways and the Golden Arches of
McDonald's. It was flight, a kind of fleeing, a kind of falling, falling higher
and higher, spinning off the edge of the earth and beyond the sun and through
the vast, silent vacuum where there were no burdens and where everything weighed
exactly nothing. Gone! they screamed, I'm sorry but I'm gone! And
so at night, not quite dreaming, they gave themselves over to lightness, they
were carried, they were purely borne."
Tim O'Brien The Things They Carried
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment