How to Fly

I flew for the first time when I was nine years old. Nobody saw it happen, but that didn’t bother me: the Wright Brothers’ earliest ascent had also been conducted in the strictest secrecy and, until public pressure forced them out of hiding, any number of successful flights had gone unwitnessed. Of course, Orville and Wilbur hadn’t attempted to do what I was doing: like Blériot and Santos-Dumont, they were changing the known world, but they weren’t committed to flying in its purest sense. They were mechanics, not angels; what I wanted was something that they had never even considered and, though I knew I was destined to fail, I wasn’t prepared to settle for anything as mundane as a flying machine. Though I admired those early aviators more than anyone else in history, I knew, even then, that the people we think of as pioneers were pioneers only of machine flight—which, for me, was as different from actual flying as a conjuring trick is from natural magic. I didn’t want to soar with the aid of an engine; I wanted a miracle, a triumph of the will. I wanted to fly unassisted, like a bird, or a medieval monk.