Flights

ATTEMPTS AT TRAVEL STEREOMETRY

A man awakens from an uneasy sleep on a big intercontinental plane and puts his face to the window. He sees below a massive dark land. Only here and there do weak groups of lights make their way out of that darkness – those are big cities. Thanks to the map illuminated on the screens he figures out that this is Russia, somewhere in central Siberia. He wraps himself up in his blanket and falls back asleep.

Down below, in one of those dark spots, another man is just walking out of his wooden home and raising his eyes to the sky, checking the weather for tomorrow.

If we were to pull a hypothetical straight line out of the centre of the earth, it might turn out that for a fraction of a second both of these people found themselves on that radius. Perhaps for just a second their gazes fell on it together, this beam perhaps linking their eyes.

For a brief moment these men were vertical neighbours; what is, after all, eleven thousand metres? Barely more than ten kilometres. That’s a lot less than the nearest settlement for that man on earth. It’s less than the distance dividing the neighbourhoods of a big city.