On irrationality

Planes are monstrous and magnificent things. When you’re buckled in one, idly glancing towards the stewards making the rounds with their carts teeming of individually wrapped pretzels – the stewards whose carefully pressed linen look is asserted with a fresh knotted kerchief, undulating to its owners’ deceptively therapeutic voice — habituation from the utter mundaneness of their motions, their comportment, is but trickery to the mind. The sheer ordinariness instilled by the moderate prevalence of flights in the cultural narrative – this insane ritual that provides a strong sense of order — prevents the conception of what is actually occurring.

And then very steadily, as not to betray my not quite fully realized fear, the eyes move to peer through the double-paned windows, landing on the turbines whose diameters span at the very least two full-grown adults across. As I, with a perfunctory smile, accept the coffee from the attendant, continuing with this exchange of charades, the turbulence can’t help but etch itself on to the surface of the drink, and thoughts, in one fell swoop, latch back on to the very real turbines drowning in their white noise immensity, whisking cloud to cumunolimbic dust. And it’s only then that I let myself become the inconvenient victim of the “intraocular effect”. It hits me. Between the eyes. With the light of a thousand suns.

I have full faith in science: Bill Nye held a significant place in my childhood during my most impressionable years; he was always there, unfailingly adorned with bow tie, to explain what’s happening in a way that a seven-year-old could understand. Nowadays, one can find me in a lab, Feynman’s books in my bags and dotingly following Dawkins and Neil DeGrasse Tyson on Twitter. Hobbies include physics problems. I could diagram the aerodynamic description of lift on an exam. In spite of all this, it just seems impossible for this plane, currently encapsulating my body and a hundred or so others, to be able to do with any ounce of grace or swiftness what paper planes slicing classroom air can do. Under the proper circumstances, I simply don’t care what Bernoulli or Newton say – that moment when the wheels lift from the ground and the wings take over with the roar of the engine knocking every neuron between my ears to the brink of a neurological disaster, my palms invariably get sweaty. It’s all very antithetical. The climb both excites and disturbs me greatly; my autonomic nervous system’s wires are crossed – am I in fight or flight? – I watch the city shrink, as the machine works a geometrically sensible upward arc. The earth falls away to trim and neat Euclidean shapes, almost indistinguishable from a circuit board, copper wires for luminescence. Life on the ground begins to look like an elaborate plaything, toiling away as determinedly as ever, and the moon peeks out from under the swooping wing. I tend to remain seated, my sole focal point centered squarely on the seatbelt light, hands flexing aimlessly, masochistically reminding myself this is indeed a live show and there really are thousands of cubic feet of air beneath me — interrupted perhaps by only, a flock or two of birds — that those really are glaciers and glaciers are truly quite cold and we’re bearing cloud. And it really isn’t until the seatbelt light turns off that the sweat glands in my hands return to default productivity and I can muster up some other facial expression that isn’t tainted with distress.

There are times when I can’t quite feature certain tendencies in human behavior, our endearing follies crystallized by our own devising. It’s egregious to me that global warming or evolution is even a contentious issue. I can’t, with logical might, convince the dogmatic to consider a spectrum of options or alternative views. Reason, no matter how watertight, is dashed to bits by the solidified sediments of fear. With feet cemented to ground, gazing upwards at the plane’s chalk-like traces thrown into sharp relief again the tresses of blue, it’s easy to proclaim without hesitation how formidable modern technology is, that we can outwit our own anatomical limitations, or make some fine and heart-ravishing poetic gestures. But buoyed by thin air, in the culmination of elegant equations into a tangible craft, I look down a narrow vista with bated breath.