![]() ![]() ![]() Our own wistful fairytales tell of magic carpet rides, the pixie dust in Peter Pan, and the plaintive lament of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz (“birds fly over the rainbow, why then, oh why can’t I?”). Who hasn’t dreamed in their sleep they could fly, cruising like Superman over the houses and trees in the neighborhood? Who hasn’t envied the birds? Who hasn’t imagined that if heaven exists surely we shall be able to fly there, like angels? The dream of breaking the chains of gravity and escaping our two-dimensional life seems to be part of what makes us human. And no part of Nature conjures our hopes and fears more than the sky. Our youth is vanquished until we aging dreamers succumb to what Germans called Weltschmerz (world-grief ) and Lebensmuedigkeit (life-weariness). Wild Nature, to the Romantic, is a beautiful temptress who beckons mankind to possess her only to turn all of our dreams into nightmares. The story of human flight is rightly called a romance, both in the sense of a romantic affair full of anguish and joy, and in the grander sense of Romanticism, that cultural mood expressing the human psyche’s disillusionment with its rational efforts to control and give meaning to life itself. But I shall always associate Pachelbel with the sweetest of human hungers: To Fly! ![]() Alas, Hollywood spoiled Pachelbel’s magic the following year by using the Canon for theme music in Ordinary People, whereupon it devolved into Muzak. Sublime beyond words, its haunting, bittersweet melody put into sound the feelings of a mortal race able to imagine heavenly things, but unable to grasp them. It was the Canon in D Major by the Lutheran organist Johann Pachelbel. Music that did not still the chatter of children, but reduced most adults to silence, then wonder, as if setting the mood for a religious experience. Music was played over the speakers while the audience filed in and found seats. But the magic began for me even before the lights dimmed. It had recently installed a two-story high IMAX movie theater and crowds flocked to view its inaugural film, “To Fly!” A paean to the romance of human flight, the cinematography thrilled. While researching the history of space technology at the NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., I frequently visited the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum- the most visited museum in the world. ![]()
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