Read Online Taking Off by Eric Kraft - Free Book Online

be.’ How much does it cost?”
    â€œThe kit includes virtually everything one needs to build a 909.”
    â€œâ€˜Virtually.’”
    â€œWell, everything except a few parts that you can find in almost any hardware store.”
    â€œâ€˜Almost.’”
    â€œOne of the remarkable things about the 909 is the fact that you can hitch it behind a car and tow it to the airport.”
    â€œCurrently, the budget will not support the purchase of a car.”
    â€œThe wings fold back against the sides of the fuselage—”
    â€œNot while you’re in the air, right?”
    â€œRarely, I’m sure.”
    â€œWhy am I reminded of something made out of feathers and wax?”
    â€œMostly plywood, actually. Glued together with epoxy.”
    â€œYou want to take your honey into the clouds in a plywood plane?”
    â€œThe 909 needs barely a hundred feet of takeoff roll before she slips the surly bonds.”
    â€œImpressive. How much does this plywood kit cost?”
    â€œNo more than that used roadster with the FOR SALE sign that you sigh over when you walk past it every morning.”
    â€œI suggest that you confine your flying to the realm of the science of imaginary solutions.”
    *   *   *
    BALZAC WAS A MASTER of the science of imaginary solutions. In Louis Lambert, Balzac wrote, “Whenever I like, I can draw a veil over my eyes. Suddenly I go back into myself, and there I find a dark room, a camera obscura, in which all the accidents of nature reproduce themselves in a form far purer than the form in which they appeared to my external senses.”
    I sometimes draw that veil. I am not so adept that I can draw it whenever I like, but I can draw it at times. The place where I find the pure reproductions of the accidents of nature, my equivalent of Balzac’s “dark room,” is memory, of course, and even a painful memory is a refuge from a painful present. Perhaps, reader, you feel, as I do, that much of the present is not what you wish it were, not only your personal present but the present of our contentious, bullying species. Sometimes, I just want to fly away, to take flight, take off, make my getaway.
    Flight! The word itself makes my thoughts soar, and saying it, softly, to myself, in a time of troubles, makes me feel a bit of its lift. Balzac has the young Louis Lambert say,
    Often have I made the most delightful voyage, floating on a word down the abyss of the past, like an insect embarked on a blade of grass tossing on the ripples of a stream.… What a fine book might be written of the life and adventures of a word! It has, of course, received various stamps from the occasions on which it has served its purpose; it has conveyed different ideas in different places; but is it not still grander to think of it under the three aspects of soul, body, and motion? Merely to regard it in the abstract, apart from its functions, its effects, and its influence, is enough to cast one into an ocean of meditations. Are not most words colored by the idea they represent? Then, to whose genius are they due?
    â€¦ Is it to this time-honored spirit that we owe the mysteries lying buried in every human word? In the word true do we not discern a certain imaginary rectitude? Does not the compact brevity of its sound suggest a vague image of chaste nudity and the simplicity of truth in all things? The syllable seems to me singularly crisp and fresh.
    â€¦ I chose the formula of an abstract idea on purpose, not wishing to illustrate the case by a word which should make it too obvious to the apprehension, as the word flight for instance, which is a direct appeal to the senses.
    Perhaps you sometimes have, as I do, so strong a desire for flight, so strong a yearning to leave your present circumstances, that you are willing to trust your fate to feathers and wax. At such times, if I am able to, I draw a veil.

Chapter 14
    No Laughing Matter
    I AM