Flying over London
FIFTY or sixty aeroplanes were collected in the shed like a flock of grasshoppers. The grasshopper has the same enormous thighs, the same little boat shaped body resting between its thighs, and if touched with a blade of grass, he too springs high into the air.
The mechanics ran the aeroplane out on to the turf; and Flight-Lieutenant Hopgood, at whose invitation we had come to make our first flight, stooped down and made the engine roar. A thousand pens have described the sensation of leaving earth; “The earth drops from you,” they say; one sits still and the world has fallen. It is true that the earth fell, but what was stranger was the downfall of the sky. One was not prepared within a moment of taking off to be immersed in it, alone with it, to be in the thick of it. Habit has fixed the earth immovably in the centre of the imagination like a hard ball; everything is made to the scale of houses and streets. And as one rises up into the sky, as the sky pours down over one, this little hard granular knob, with its carvings and frettings, dissolves, crumbles, loses its domes, its pinnacles, its firesides, its habits, and one becomes conscious of being a little mammal, hot-blooded, hard boned, with a clot of red blood in one’s body, trespassing up here in a fine air; repugnant to it, unclean, antipathetic. Vertebrae, ribs, entrails, and red blood belong to the earth; to the world of brussels sprouts and sheep going awkwardly on four pointed legs. Here are winds tapering, vanishing, and the untimed manoeuvre of clouds, and nothing permanent, but vanishing and melting at the touch of each other without concussion, and the fields that with us are meted into yards and grow punctually wheat and barley are here made and remade perpetually with flourishes of rain and flights of hail and spaces tranquil as the deep sea, and then all is chop and change, breeze and motion. Yet, though we flew through territories with never a hedge or stick to divide them, nameless, unowned, so inveterately anthropocentric is the mind that instinctively the aeroplane becomes a boat and we are sailing towards a harbour and there we shall be received by hands that lift themselves from swaying garments; welcoming, accepting. Wraiths (our aspirations and imaginations) have their home here; and in spite of our vertebrae, ribs, and entrails, we are also vapour and air, and shall be united.
Here Flight-Commander Hopgood by a touch on the lever, turned the nose of the Moth downwards. Nothing more fantastic could be imagined. Houses, streets, banks, public buildings, and habits and mutton and brussels sprouts had been swept into long spirals and curves of pink and purple like that a wet brush makes when it sweeps mounds of paint together. One could see through the Bank of England; all the business houses were transparent; the River Thames was as the Romans saw it, as paleolithic man saw it, at dawn from a hill shaggy with wood, with the rhinoceros digging his horn into the roots of rhododendrons. So immortally fresh and virginal London looked and England was earth merely, merely the world. Flight-Lieutenant Hopgood kept his finger still on the lever which turns the plane downwards. A spark glinted on a greenhouse. There rose a dome, a spire, a factory chimney, a gasometer. Civilization in short emerged; hands and minds worked again; and the centuries vanished and the wild rhinoceros was chased out of sight for ever. Still we descended. Here was a garden; here a football field. But no human being was yet visible; England looked like a ship that sails unmanned. Perhaps the race was dead, and we should board the world like that ship’s company who found the ship sailing with all her sails set, and the kettle on the fire, but not a soul on board. Yet a spot down there, something squat and minute, might be a horse — or a man.... But Hopgood touched another lever and we rose again like a spirit shaking contamination from its wings, shaking gasometers and factories and football fields from its feet.
It was a moment of renunciation. We prefer the other, we seemed to say. Wraiths and sand dunes and mist; imagination; this we prefer to the mutton and the entrails. It was the idea of death that now suggested itself; not being received and welcomed; not immortality but extinction. For the clouds above were black. Across them there passed in single file a flight of gulls, livid white against the leaden background, holding on their way with the authority of owners, having rights, and means of communication unknown to us, an alien, a privileged race. But where there are gulls only, life is not. Life ends; life is dowsed in that cloud as lamps are dowsed with a wet sponge. That extinction has become now desirable. For it was odd in this voyage to note how blindly the tide of the soul and its desires rolled this way and that, carrying consciousness like a feather on the top, marking the direction, not controlling it. And so we swept on now up to death.
Hopgood’s head cased in leather with a furry rim to it had the semblance of a winged pilot, of Charon’s head, remorselessly conducting his passenger to the wet sponge which annihilates. For the mind (one can but repeat these things without claiming sense or truth for them — merely that they were such) is convinced in its own fastness, in its solitude, of extinction, and what is more, proud of it, as if it deserved extinction, extinction profited it more and were more desirable than prolongation on other terms by other wills. Charon, the mind prayed to the back of Flight-Lieutenant Hopgood, carry me on; thrust me deep, deep; till every glimmer of light in me, of heat of knowledge, even the tingling I feel in my toes is dulled; after all this living, all this scratching and tingling of sensation, that too — darkness, dullness, the black wet — will be also a sensation. And such is the incurable vanity of the human mind that the cloud, the wet sponge that was to extinguish, became, now that one thought of a contact with one’s own mind, a furnace in which we roared up, and our death was a fire; brandished at the summit of life, many tongued, blood red, visible over land and sea. Extinction! The word is consummation.
Now we were in the skirts of the cloud and the wings of the aeroplane were spattered with hail; hail shot past silver and straight like the flash of steel railway lines. Innumerable arrows shot at us, down the august avenue of our approach.
Then Charon turned his head with its fringe of fur and laughed at us. It was an ugly face, with high cheek bones, and little deep sunk eyes, and all down one cheek was a crease where he had been cut and stitched together. Perhaps he weighed fifteen stone; he was oak limbed and angular. But for all this nothing now remained of Flight-Lieutenant Hopgood but a flame such as one sees blown thin and furtive at a street corner; a flame that for all its agility can hardly escape death. Such was the Flight-Lieutenant become; and ourselves too, so that the clinging hands, the embraces, the companionship of those about to die together was vanished; there was no flesh. However, just as one comes to the end of an avenue of trees and finds a pond with ducks on it, and nothing but lead-coloured water, so we came through the avenue of hail and out into a pool so still, so quiet, with haze above and cloud below it, so that we seemed to float as a duck floats on a pond. But the haze above us was compact of whiteness. As colour runs to the end of a paint brush, so the blue of the sky had run into one blob beneath it. It was white above us. And now the ribs and the entrails of the sprout-eating mammal began to be frozen, pulverized, frozen to lightness and whiteness of this spectral universe, and nothingness. For no clouds voyaged and lumbered up there; with light fondling them and masses breaking off their slopes or again towering and swelling. Here was no feather, no crease to break the steep wall ascending for ever up, for ever and ever.
And those yellowish lights, Hopgood and oneself, were put out effectively as the sun blanches the flame on a coal. No sponge effaced us, with its damp snout. Nothingness was poured down upon us like a mound of white sand. Then as if some part of us kept its ponderosity, down we fell into fleeciness, substance, and colour; all the colours of pounded plums and dolphins and blankets and seas and rain clouds crushed together, staining — purple, black, steel, all this soft ripeness seethed about us, and the eye felt as a fish feels when it slips from the rock into the depths of the sea.
For a time we were muffled in the clouds. Then the fairy earth appeared, lying far far below, a mere slice or knife blade of colour floating. It rose towards us with e
xtreme speed, broadening and lengthening; forests appeared on it and seas; and then again an uneasy dark blot which soon began to be pricked with spires and blown into bubbles and domes. Nearer and nearer we came together and had again the whole of civilization spread beneath us, silent, empty, like a demonstration made for our instruction; the river with the steamers that bring coal and iron; the churches, the factories, the railways. Nothing moved; nobody worked the machine, until in some field on the outskirts of London one saw a dot actually and certainly move. Though the dot was the size of a bluebottle and its movement minute, reason insisted that it was a horse and it was galloping, but all speed and size were so reduced that the speed of the horse seemed very very slow, and its size minute. Now, however, there were often movements in the streets, as of sliding and stopping; and then gradually the vast creases of the stuff beneath began moving, and one saw in the creases millions of insects moving. In another second they became men, men of business, in the heart of the white city buildings.
Through a pair of Zeiss glasses one could indeed now see the tops of the heads of separate men and could distinguish a bowler from a cap, and could thus be certain of social grades — which was an employer, which was a working man. And one had to change perpetually air values into land values. There were blocks in the city of traffic sometimes almost a foot long; these had to be translated into eleven or twelve Rolls Royces in a row with city magnates waiting furious; and one had to add up the fury of the magnates; and say — even though it was all silent and the block was only a few inches in length, how scandalous the control of the traffic is in the City of London.
But with a turn of his wrist Flight-Lieutenant Hopgood flew over the poor quarters, and there through the Zeiss glasses one could see people looking up at the noise of the aeroplane, and could judge the expression on their faces. It was not one that one sees ordinarily. It was complex. “And I have to scrub the steps,” it seemed to say grudgingly. All the same, they saluted, they sent us greeting; they were capable of flight. And after all, here the head was turned down again and the scrubbing brush was grasped tightly, to fall on the pavement wouldn’t be nice. And they shook their heads; but they looked up at us again. But further on, over Oxford Street perhaps it was, nobody noticed us at all, but went on jostling each other with some furious desire absorbing them, for a sight of something (there was a yellowish flash as we passed overhead) in a shop window. Further, by Bayswater perhaps, where the press was thinner, a face, a figure, something odd in hat or person suddenly caught one’s eye. And then it was odd how one became resentful of all the flags and surfaces and of the innumerable windows symmetrical as avenues, symmetrical as forest groves, and wished for some opening, and to push indoors and be rid of surfaces. Up in Bayswater a door did open, and instantly, of course, there appeared a room, incredibly small, of course, and ridiculous in its attempt to be separate and itself, and then — it was a woman’s face, young, perhaps, at any rate with a black cloak and a red hat that made the furniture — here a bowl, there a sideboard with apples on it, cease to be interesting because the power that buys a mat, or sets two colours together, became perceptible, as one may say that the haze over an electric fire becomes perceptible. Everything had changed its values seen from the air. Personality was outside the body, abstract. And one wished to be able to animate the heart, the legs, the arms with it, to do which it would be necessary to be there, so as to collect; so as to give up this arduous game, as one flies through the air, of assembling things that lie on the surface.
And then the field curved round us, and we were caught in an eddy of green cloth and white racing palings that flew round us like tape, and touched earth and went at an enormous speed, pitching, bumping upon a rocky surface, hard curves, after the plumes of air. We had landed, and it was over.
As a matter of fact, the flight had not begun; for when Flight-Lieutenant Hopgood stooped and made the engine roar, he had found a defect of some sort in the machine, and raising his head, he had said very sheepishly, “‘Fraid it’s no go to-day.”
So we had not flown after all.
The Sun and the Fish
IT is an amusing game, especially for a dark winter’s morning. One says to the eye Athens; Segesta; Queen Victoria; and one waits, as submissively as possible, to see what will happen next. And perhaps nothing happens, and perhaps a great many things happen, but not the things one might expect. The old lady in horn spectacles — the late Queen — is vivid enough; but somehow she has allied herself with a soldier in Picadilly who is stooping to pick up a coin; with a yellow camel who is swaying through an archway in Kensington Gardens; with a kitchen chair and a distinguished old gentleman waving his hat. Dropped years ago into the mind, she has become stuck about with all sorts of alien matter. When one says Queen Victoria, one draws up the most heterogeneous collection of objects, which it will take a week at least to sort. On the other hand, one may say to oneself Mont Blanc at dawn, the Taj Mahal in the moonlight; and the mind remains a blank. For a sight will only survive in the queer pool in which we deposit our memories if it has the good luck to ally itself with some other emotion by which it is preserved. Sights marry, incongruously, morganatically (like the Queen and the Camel), and so keep each other alive. Mont Blanc, the Taj Mahal, sights which we travelled and toiled to see, fade and perish and disappear because they failed to find the right mate. On our deathbeds we shall see nothing more majestic than a cat on a wall or an old woman in a sun-bonnet.
So, on this dark winter’s morning, when the real world has faded, let us see what the eye can do for us. Show me the eclipse, we say to the eye; let us see that strange spectacle again. And we see at once — but the mind’s eye is only by courtesy an eye; it is a nerve which hears and smells, which transmits heat and cold, which is attached to the brain and rouses the mind to discriminate and speculate — it is only for brevity’s sake that we say that we “see” at once a railway station at night. A crowd is gathered at a barrier; but how curious a crowd! Mackintoshes are slung over their arms; in their hands they carry little cases. They have a provisional, extemporized look. They have that moving and disturbing unity which comes from the consciousness that they (but here it would be more proper to say “we”) have a purpose in common. Never was there a stranger purpose than that which brought us together that June night in Euston Railway Station. We were come to see the dawn. Trains like ours were starting all over England at that very moment to see the dawn. All noses were pointing north. When for a moment we halted in the depths of the country, there were the pale yellow lights of motor cars also pointing north. There was no sleep, no fixity in England that night. All were on the roads; all were travelling north. All were thinking of the dawn. As the night wore on, the sky, which was the object of so many million thoughts, assumed greater substance and prominence than usual. The consciousness of the whitish soft canopy above us increased in weight as the hours passed. When in chill early morning we were turned out on a Yorkshire roadside, our senses had orientated themselves differently from usual. We were no longer in the same relation to people, houses, and trees; we were related to the whole world. We had come, not to lodge in the bedroom of an inn; we were come for a few hours of disembodied intercourse with the sky.
Everything was very pale. The river was pale and the fields, brimming with grasses and tasselled flowers which should have been red, had no colour in them, but lay there whispering and waving round colourless farmhouses. Now the farmhouse door would open, and out would step to join the procession the farmer and his family in their Sunday clothes, neat, dark and silent as if they were going up hill to church; or sometimes women merely leant on the window sills of the upper rooms watching the procession pass with amused contempt, it appeared — they have come such hundreds of miles, and for what? they seemed to say — in complete silence. We had an odd sense of keeping an appointment with an actor of such vast proportions that he would come silently and be everywhere.
By the time we were at the meeting place, on a h
igh fell where the hills stretched their limbs out over the flowing brown moorland below, we had put on too — though we were cold and with our feet stood in red bog water were likely to be still colder, though some of us were squatted on mackintoshes among cups and plates, eating, and others were fantastically accoutred and none were at their best — still we had put on a certain dignity. Rather, perhaps, we had put off the little badges and signs of individuality. We were strung out against the sky in outline and had the look of statues standing prominent on the ridge of the world. We were very, very old; we were men and women of the primeval world come to salute the dawn. So the worshippers at Stonehenge must have looked among tussocks of grass and boulders of rock. Suddenly, from the motor car of some Yorkshire squire, there bounded four large, lean, red dogs, hounds of the ancient world, hunting dogs, they seemed, leaping with their noses close to the ground on the track of boar or deer. Meanwhile, the sun was rising. A cloud glowed as a white shade glows when the light is slowly turned up behind it. Golden wedge-shaped streamers fell from it and marked the trees in the valley green and the villages blue-brown. In the sky behind us there swam white islands in pale blue lakes. The sky was open and free there, but in front of us a soft snowbank had massed itself. Yet, as we looked, we saw it proving worn and thin in patches. The gold momentarily increased, melting the whiteness to a fiery gauze, and this grew frailer and frailer till, for one instant, we saw the sun in full splendour. Then there was a pause, a moment of suspense, like that which precedes a race. The starter held his watch in his hand, counting the seconds. Now they were off.
The sun had to race through the clouds and to reach the goal, which was a thin transparency to the right, before the sacred seconds were up. He started. The clouds flung every obstacle in his way. They clung, they impeded. He dashed through them. He could be felt, flashing and flying when he was invisible. His speed was tremendous. Here he was out and bright; now he was under and lost. But always one felt him flying and thrusting through the murk to his goal. For one second he emerged and showed himself to us through our glasses, a hollowed sun, a crescent sun. Finally, he went under for his last effort. Now he was completely blotted out. The moments passed. Watches were held in hand after hand. The sacred twenty-four seconds were begun. Unless he could win through before the last one was over, he was lost. Still one felt him tearing and racing behind the clouds to win free; but the clouds held him. They spread; they thickened; they slackened; they muffled his speed. Of the twenty-four seconds only five remained, and still he was obscured. And, as the fatal seconds passed, and we realized that the sun was being defeated, had now, indeed, lost the race, all the colour began to go from the moor. The blue turned to purple; the white became livid as at the approach of a violent but windless storm. Pink faces went green, and it became colder than ever. This was the defeat of the sun, then, and this was all, so we thought, turning in disappointment from the dull cloud blanket in front of us to the moors behind. They were livid, they were purple; but suddenly one became aware that something more was about to happen; something unexpected, awful, unavoidable. The shadow growing darker and darker over the moor was like the heeling over of a boat, which, instead of righting itself at the critical moment, turns a little further and then a little further on its side; and suddenly capsizes. So the light turned and heeled over and went out. This was the end. The flesh and blood of the world was dead; only the skeleton was left. It hung beneath us, a frail shell; brown; dead; withered. Then, with some trifling movement, this profound obeisance of the light, this stooping down and abasement of all splendour was over. Lightly, on the other side of the world, up it rose; it sprang up as if the one movement, after a second’s tremendous pause, completed the other, and the light which had died here rose again elsewhere. Never was there such a sense of rejuvenescence and recovery. All the convalescences and respites of life seemed rolled into one. Yet, at first, so light and frail and strange the colour was, sprinkled rainbow-like in a hoop of colour, that it seemed as if the earth could never live decked out in such frail tints. It hung beneath us, like a cage, like a hoop, like a globe of glass. It might be blown out; it might be stove in. But steadily and surely our relief broadened and our confidence established itself as the great paint-brush washed in woods dark on the valley, and massed hills blue above them. The world became more and more solid; it became populous; it became a place where an infinite number of farmhouses, of villages, of railway lines have lodgement; until the whole fabric of civilization was modelled and moulded. But still the memory endured that the earth we stand on is made of colour; colour can be blown out; and then we stand on a dead leaf; and we who tread the earth securely now have seen it dead.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 468