Aerial View Quotes

Perhaps that was the magic of any holiday; it lifted you out of the familiar and gave you a brief aerial view of your life in progress. It made you confront your world’s smallness in a vastness of opportunity.

Finding a taxi, she felt like a child pressing her nose to the window of a candy store as she watched the changing vista pass by while the twilight descended and the capital became bathed in a translucent misty lavender glow. Entering the city from that airport was truly unique. Charles de Gaulle, built nineteen miles north of the bustling metropolis, ensured that the final point of destination was veiled from the eyes of the traveller as they descended. No doubt, the officials scrupulously planned the airport’s location to prevent the incessant air traffic and roaring engines from visibly or audibly polluting the ambience of their beloved capital, and apparently, they succeeded. If one flew over during the summer months, the visitor would be visibly presented with beautifully managed quilt-like fields of alternating gold and green appearing as though they were tilled and clipped with the mathematical precision of a slide rule. The countryside was dotted with quaint villages and towns that were obviously under meticulous planning control. When the aircraft began to descend, this prevailing sense of exactitude and order made the visitor long for an aerial view of the capital city and its famous wonders, hoping they could see as many landmarks as they could before they touched ground, as was the usual case with other major international airports, but from this point of entry, one was denied a glimpse of the city below. Green fields, villages, more fields, the ground grew closer and closer, a runway appeared, a slight bump or two was felt as the craft landed, and they were surrounded by the steel and glass buildings of the airport. Slightly disappointed with this mysterious game of hide-and-seek, the voyager must continue on and collect their baggage, consoled by the reflection that they will see the metropolis as they make their way into town. For those travelling by road, the concrete motorway with its blue road signs, the underpasses and the typical traffic-logged hubbub of industrial areas were the first landmarks to greet the eye, without a doubt, it was a disheartening first impression. Then, the real introduction began. Quietly, and almost imperceptibly, the modern confusion of steel and asphalt was effaced little by little as the exquisite timelessness of Parisian heritage architecture was gradually unveiled. Popping up like mushrooms were cream sandstone edifices filigreed with curled, swirling carvings, gently sloping mansard roofs, elegant ironwork lanterns and wood doors that charmed the eye, until finally, the traveller was completely submerged in the glory of the Second Empire ala Baron Haussmann’s master plan of city design, the iconic grand mansions, tree-lined boulevards and avenues, the quaint gardens, the majestic churches with their towers and spires, the shops and cafés with their colourful awnings, all crowded and nestled together like jewels encrusted on a gold setting.

You see more people walking now. With children, dogs. We always wave from our front porch and think if they just keep on walking that direction, pretty soon they’ll find themselves out on the prairie. Think of that. An aerial view of all these kind, goodhearted, small-town people, kids in tow and dogs on leashes, walking across the prairie in a kind of trance, a kind of resignation.

Sense of humor means seeing both poles of a situation as they are, from an aerial point of view. There is good and there is bad and you see both with a panoramic view as though from above. Then you begin to feel that these little people on the ground, killing each other or making love or just being little people, are very insignificant in the sense that, if they begin to make a big deal of their warfare or lovemaking, then we begin to see the ironic aspect of their clamor. If we try very hard to build something tremendous, really meaningful, powerful—“I’m really searching for something, I’m really trying to fight my faults,” or “I’m really trying to be good”—then it loses its seriousness, becomes a paper tiger; it is extremely ironic.

I've heard about a man and woman who are walking the length of the Great Wall of China, approaching each other from opposite directions. Every time I think of them, I see them from above., with the Wall twisting and winding through the landscape and two tiny human figures moving toward each other from remote provinces, step by step. I think this is a story of reverence for the planet, of trying to understand how we belong to the planet in a new way. And it's strange how I construct an aerial view so naturally.

Optimism is a deadly vice of gigantic proportions lodged into the human psyche by Satan. It is the enemy of reality. We see a bad situation and optimism prevents us from extrapolating that. Instead we think, "Oh, it's bound to get better." So we plunge into the thicket, sure that it will thin, denied the aerial view that would show us the true, unacceptable horror of our lot. Perhaps optimism is good for prison escapees, who have no choice but to plod on. The rest of us are not well served. It poisons our judgment.

In the act of watching the television news, audiences cross the globe, one moment viewing a scene in a wide aerial shot, the next moment seeing an emotional close up of a victim’s face. By extending the physical senses to impossible dimensions, media provide audiences a near metaphysical adventure.

There are a few familiar landmarks from the area—a conical hill, perhaps a castle—but the aerial view seems to be, typical of Leonardo, a mix of the actual and the imagined, viewed as if by a soaring bird. The glory of being an artist, he realized, was that reality should inform but not constrain. “If the painter wishes to see beauties that would enrapture him, he is master of their production,” he wrote. “If he seeks valleys, if he wants to disclose great expanses of countryside from the summits of mountains, and if he subsequently wishes to see the horizon of the sea, he is lord of all of them.”44

In fact, I had amused myself on the ride to the smithy by imagining an aerial view of the village as a representation of a skeletal forearm and hand; the High Street was the radius, along which lay the shops and businesses and the residences of the more well-to-do. St. Margaret’s Lane was the ulna, a narrower street running parallel with the High, tenanted by smithy, tannery, and the less genteel artisans and businesses. The village square (which, like all village squares I had ever seen, was not square at all, but roughly oblong) formed the carpals and metacarpals of the hand, while the several lanes of cottages made up the phalangeal joints of the fingers. The Duncans’ house stood on the square, as behooved the residence of the procurator fiscal. This was a matter of convenience as well as status; the square could be used for those judicial matters which, by reason of public interest or legal necessity, overflowed the narrow confines of Arthur Duncan’s study. And it was, as Dougal explained, convenient to the pillory, a homely wooden contraption that stood on a small stone plinth in the center of the square, adjacent to the wooden stake used—with thrifty economy of purpose—as whipping post, maypole, flagstaff and horse tether, depending upon requirements.

It is a painful irony that silent movies were driven out of existence just as they were reaching a kind of glorious summit of creativity and imagination, so that some of the best silent movies were also some of the last ones. Of no film was that more true than Wings, which opened on August 12 at the Criterion Theatre in New York, with a dedication to Charles Lindbergh. The film was the conception of John Monk Saunders, a bright young man from Minnesota who was also a Rhodes scholar, a gifted writer, a handsome philanderer, and a drinker, not necessarily in that order. In the early 1920s, Saunders met and became friends with the film producer Jesse Lasky and Lasky’s wife, Bessie. Saunders was an uncommonly charming fellow, and he persuaded Lasky to buy a half-finished novel he had written about aerial combat in the First World War. Fired with excitement, Lasky gave Saunders a record $39,000 for the idea and put him to work on a script. Had Lasky known that Saunders was sleeping with his wife, he might not have been quite so generous. Lasky’s choice for director was unexpected but inspired. William Wellman was thirty years old and had no experience of making big movies—and at $2 million Wings was the biggest movie Paramount had ever undertaken. At a time when top-rank directors like Ernst Lubitsch were paid $175,000 a picture, Wellman was given a salary of $250 a week. But he had one advantage over every other director in Hollywood: he was a World War I flying ace and intimately understood the beauty and enchantment of flight as well as the fearful mayhem of aerial combat. No other filmmaker has ever used technical proficiency to better advantage. Wellman had had a busy life already. Born into a well-to-do family in Brookline, Massachusetts, he had been a high school dropout, a professional ice hockey player, a volunteer in the French Foreign Legion, and a member of the celebrated Lafayette Escadrille flying squad. Both France and the United States had decorated him for gallantry. After the war he became friends with Douglas Fairbanks, who got him a job at the Goldwyn studios as an actor. Wellman hated acting and switched to directing. He became what was known as a contract director, churning out low-budget westerns and other B movies. Always temperamental, he was frequently fired from jobs, once for slapping an actress. He was a startling choice to be put in charge of such a challenging epic. To the astonishment of everyone, he now made one of the most intelligent, moving, and thrilling pictures ever made. Nothing was faked. Whatever the pilot saw in real life the audiences saw on the screen. When clouds or exploding dirigibles were seen outside airplane windows they were real objects filmed in real time. Wellman mounted cameras inside the cockpits looking out, so that the audiences had the sensation of sitting at the pilots’ shoulders, and outside the cockpit looking in, allowing close-up views of the pilots’ reactions. Richard Arlen and Buddy Rogers, the two male stars of the picture, had to be their own cameramen, activating cameras with a remote-control button.

The masses of dense foliage all round became prison walls, impassable circular green ice-walls, surging towards her; just before they closed in, I caught the terrified glint of her eyes. On a winter day she was in the studio, posing for him in the nude, her arms raised in a graceful position. To hold it for any length of time must have been a strain, I wondered how she managed to keep so still; until I saw the cords attached to her wrists and ankles. Instead of the darkness, she faced a stupendous sky-conflagration, an incredible glacial dream-scene. Cold coruscations of rainbow fire pulsed overhead, shot through by shafts of pure incandescence thrown out by mountains of solid ice towering all round. Closer, the trees round the house, sheathed in ice, dripped and sparkled with weird prismatic jewels, reflecting the vivid changing cascades above. Instead of the familiar night sky, the aurora borealis formed a blazing, vibrating roof of intense cold and colour, beneath which the earth was trapped with all its inhabitants, walled in by those impassable glittering ice-cliffs. The world had become an arctic prison from which no escape was possible, all its creatures trapped as securely as were the trees, already lifeless inside their deadly resplendent armour. Frozen by the deathly cold emanating from the ice, dazzled by the blaze of crystalline ice-light, she felt herself becoming part of the polar vision, her structure becoming one with the structure of ice and snow. As her fate, she accepted the world of ice, shining, shimmering, dead; she resigned herself to the triumph of glaciers and the death of her world. Fear was the climate she lived in; if she had ever known kindness it would have been different. The trees seemed to obstruct her with deliberate malice. All her life she had thought of herself as a foredoomed victim, and now the forest had become the malign force that would destroy her. In desperation she tried to run, but a hidden root tripped her, she almost fell. Branches caught in her hair, tugged her back, lashed out viciously when they were disentangled. The silver hairs torn from her head glittered among black needles; they were the clues her pursuers would follow, leading them to their victim. She escaped from the forest at length only to see the fjord waiting for her. An evil effluence rose from the water, something primitive, savage, demanding victims, hungry for a human victim. It had been night overhead all along, but below it was still daylight. There were no clouds. I saw islands scattered over the sea, a normal aerial view. Then something extraordinary, out of this world: a wall of rainbow ice jutting up from the sea, cutting right across, pushing a ridge of water ahead of it as it moved, as if the flat pale surface of sea was a carpet being rolled up. It was a sinister, fascinating sight, which did not seem intended for human eyes. I stared down at it, seeing other things at the same time. The ice world spreading over our world. Mountainous walls of ice surrounding the girl. Her moonwhite skin, her hair sparkling with diamond prisms under the moon. The moon’s dead eye watching the death of our world.

We tend to be unaware that stars rise and set at all. This is not entirely due to our living in cities ablaze with electric lights which reflect back at us from our fumes, smoke, and artificial haze. When I discussed the stars with a well-known naturalist, I was surprised to learn that even a man such as he, who has spent his entire lifetime observing wildlife and nature, was totally unaware of the movements of the stars. And he is no prisoner of smog-bound cities. He had no inkling, for instance, that the Little Bear could serve as a reliable night clock as it revolves in tight circles around the Pole Star (and acts as a celestial hour-hand at half speed - that is, it takes 24 hours rather than 12 for a single revolution). I wondered what could be wrong. Our modern civilization does not ignore the stars only because most of us can no longer see them. There are definitely deeper reasons. For even if we leave the sulphurous vapours of our Gomorrahs to venture into a natural landscape, the stars do not enter into any of our back-to-nature schemes. They simply have no place in our outlook any more. We look at them, our heads flung back in awe and wonder that they can exist in such profusion. But that is as far as it goes, except for the poets. This is simply a 'gee whiz' reaction. The rise in interest in astrology today does not result in much actual star-gazing. And as for the space programme's impact on our view of the sky, many people will attentively follow the motions of a visible satellite against a backdrop of stars whose positions are absolutely meaningless to them. The ancient mythological figures sketched in the sky were taught us as children to be quaint 'shepherds' fantasies' unworthy of the attention of adult minds. We are interested in the satellite because we made it, but the stars are alien and untouched by human hands - therefore vapid. To such a level has our technological mania, like a bacterial solution in which we have been stewed from birth, reduced us. It is only the integral part of the landscape which can relate to the stars. Man has ceased to be that. He inhabits a world which is more and more his own fantasy. Farmers relate to the skies, as well as sailors, camel caravans, and aerial navigators. For theirs are all integral functions involving the fundamental principle - now all but forgotten - of orientation. But in an almost totally secular and artificial world, orientation is thought to be un- necessary. And the numbers of people in insane asylums or living at home doped on tranquilizers testifies to our aimless, drifting metaphysic. And to our having forgotten orientation either to seasons (except to turn on the air- conditioning if we sweat or the heating system if we shiver) or to direction (our one token acceptance of cosmic direction being the wearing of sun-glasses because the sun is 'over there'). We have debased what was once the integral nature of life channelled by cosmic orientations - a wholeness - to the ennervated tepidity of skin sensations and retinal discomfort. Our interior body clocks, known as circadian rhythms, continue to operate inside us, but find no contact with the outside world. They therefore become ingrown and frustrated cycles which never interlock with our environment. We are causing ourselves to become meaningless body machines programmed to what looks, in its isolation, to be an arbitrary set of cycles. But by tearing ourselves from our context, like the still-beating heart ripped out of the body of an Aztec victim, we inevitably do violence to our psyches. I would call the new disease, with its side effect of 'alienation of the young', dementia temporalis.

Height to height and light to light, like butterflies and minor gods or aerial photographers we make this plot, pretend to view a former fate where Hardy’s rustics still forgive what seems to them but nature’s lot.

mankind.”21 Hitler also suffered from the symptoms of the autodidact: superficial knowledge without depth or audit, energized by a forceful character dulled by a lack of subtlety. While his armies were stalling in Russia, Hitler’s midday and evening table talk ranged from the quality of honey bees to the best depth of cement for autobahns, always punctuated by conspiratorial interjections of anti-Semitism, contempt for Slavic peoples, crackpot views on art, and obsessions with his own health. Oddly, on some scattered topics—the vulnerability of New York skyscrapers to aerial attacks, the nutritional value of uncooked vegetables, or the eventual popularity of what would become the Volkswagen Bug—Hitler was occasionally strangely prescient.22

It was hard to imagine the icy water thawed and re-sealing, or the sky returning to a lively blue. She had a sense of contraction, of huddling against the weather. Later, it figured in her mind as Stalinist classicism, the wind tunnel of the vast and inhuman Karl-Marx-Allee, and the shapes of people in padded jackets bending against the cruel air. A scene from Eisenstein, perhaps, with a gelid lens and the special effects of monumental vision, swollen by an aerial view and historical misery. Black outlines on white snow, impersonality, extinguishment. Exaggeration of this kind was irresistible. In that early, fierce cold, Berliners coped better.

Arjuna, there is a banyan tree that grows upside down, its roots in the sky and its trunk below. The wise know that Veda constitutes its leaves. The branches go up and down, as a consequence of nature’s tendencies, nourished by experiences. The aerial roots that grow down are actions born of desire that bind it to the realm of men. Wisdom alone can cut these downward roots, enabling discovery of the reverse banyan tree, with its primal roots, before enchantment of the senses began and obscured the view.—Bhagavad Gita: Chapter 15, verses 1 to 4 (paraphrased). The banyan tree is sacred to the Hindus. It symbolizes immortality (akshaya). But it is unique in that it has primary roots and secondary roots. The latter grow from its branches and eventually become so thick that it becomes impossible to distinguish them from the main tree trunk. In this verse, Krishna visualizes a banyan tree growing from the sky, its primary roots rising up into the sky, its secondary roots growing down to the earth. Thus, it is being nourished from above and below. The primary root rising from the sky is nourished by inner mental reality. The secondary roots going down to the earth are nourished by external material reality. The tree is who we are. We are nourished from within as well as without. Within is the atma that is immortal and infinite, and so does not suffer from the anxieties of the mortal and the finite. It is neither hungry nor frightened, nor does it yearn for validation. Without is the world of things, people, our relationships, our desires and frustrations. When we derive value from the outside, we assume that our identity is the anxious aham. So Krishna advises Arjuna to use the axe of knowledge (gyana) to cut down all secondary roots, take refuge in the primary root of atma and liberate himself. This is moksha, liberation, where we no longer seek validation from the outside, but feel eternally validated from the inside. Moksha is liberation from fear.

Let’s imagine that one of the two-dimensional creatures was able to switch planes and see the other one and see that there was some truth in both of them. Then they could flip-flop between perspectives at different times or they could say we just need to hold paradox. It’s both and neither, which mostly means giving up on making sense of reality. Or they say it’s a middle path that’s somewhere between the two. And a middle path in two dimensions is like a rounded rectangle where you kind of do something that’s a little bit circle-ish and a little bit rectangle-ish which isn’t even any true part of what a cylinder is. And the thing is that they’re just at too low of a dimensional perspective to properly understand the nature of the cylinder which is actually a very simple thing. It doesn’t require holding paradox. It doesn’t require a middle path in that way. And it’s because when we think of a middle path oftentimes we’re thinking of extremes on left or right in a gradient. But sometimes the two different perspectives aren’t on a gradient on a single axis. They’re orthogonal to each other. And the reason why this is kind of actually an interesting example is because perception itself, a perspective on something defined by perception is inherently a reduction of the information of the thing. My perspective of it is going to be a lot less total information than the actual thing is. So I can look at the object from the east side, or the west, or the top, or the north side, or the inside, microscopically, telescopically. They’ll all give me different information. None will give me the entirety of the information about the situation. And so there is no all-encompassing perspective that gives me all of the information about really almost any situation. And so what this means is that reality itself is trans-perspectival. It can’t be captured in any perspective. So multiple perspectives have to be taken, all of which will have some part of the reality, some signal. There may also be distortion. I may be looking at the thing through a fisheye lens or through a colored lens that creates some distortion. But then let’s say, I’m looking at a building and the picture, the 2D picture from the east and from the west side and from inside a particular room and the aerial view are all, obviously, very different pictures and it’s because the 3D complex building actually can’t be seen in a 2D process. So I could take a lot of pictures and I could seam them together into a kind of video that moves through the building. Now by having a video, I added the dimension of time and I go back to kind of the right dimensionally to be able to understand the thing. But that’s not a perspective. That’s a lot of perspectives that we’re able to put together. So why does this matter?

One of the problems with Slovenia’s international identity is that, when people think of Slovenia, there is no single, iconic image that comes to mind, one that acts as a badge or place-holder for this country or for its capital city. For those who have visited Slovenia, an aerial view of Lake Bled, with its island church and cliff-top castle, is probably the best, and most memorable, image of the country.

An aerial view of John D.’s golf hideaway in Lakewood, New Jersey.

there are three routes to choose from. From Morocco, the Azores, or Senegal; the Cape Verde Islands, St. Paul Island, and Cayenne. Those are the routes most talked about at the start. They are favored because they are the farthest north and the most direct. I have a better, a least safer, idea.” “I’ll warrant you have, Dave, if it’s to be found,” declared Hiram. “What is it?” inquired Elmer. “The objection to those routes,” explained the young airman, “is that the water stretches are of wide extent. What I dread most is the fear of being caught away from land.” “Is there a shorter route than those you speak of?” asked Hiram. “Yes, there is,” asserted Dave. “What is it?” “Egypt, the Sahara Desert, the French Congo, Ascension Island, St. Helena, Trinidad, Rio Janeiro, and we are on American soil.” “Capital!” cried Hiram. “I wouldn’t lose an hour, Dave,” advised Elmer, with real anxiety. “Ever since we found out that there are two of the crowd ahead of us, it seems as if I’d be willing to sleep in the seat in the machine all the way to get ahead of them.” It was a warm, clear day when the Comet came to a rest at the city of Mayamlia, in French Congo. Looking back over the ten days consumed in making the run across Egypt, through Fezzan, the width of the great desert, over darkest Africa, and into the Soudan, the airship boys had viewed a country never before thus inspected by an aerial explorer. “Baked,

There are several aerial films of the incoming tsunami, but the one that plays and replays in my imagination was shot above the town of Natori, south of the city of Sendai. It begins over land rather than sea, with a view of dun winter paddy fields. Something is moving across the landscape as if it is alive, a brown-snouted animal hungrily bounding over the earth. Its head is a scum of splintered debris; entire cars bob along on its back. It seems to steam and smoke as it moves; its body looks less like water or mud than a kind of solid vapor. And then a large boat can be seen riding it inland, hundreds of yards from the sea, and—unbelievably—blue-tiled houses, still structurally intact, spinning across the inundated fields with orange flames dancing on their roofs. The creature turns a road into a river, then swallows it whole, and then it is raging over more fields and roads towards a village and a highway thick with cars. One driver is accelerating ahead of it, racing to escape—before the car and its occupants are gobbled up by the wave.

Kelley gives the planning everything he’s got, both strategically and financially. He rents a Jaguar, the height of luxury (and fast, Kelley thinks). They will drive to Boston, have dinner at Alden and Harlow in Cambridge, and stay at the Langham, Mitzi’s favorite hotel—then in the morning, after breakfast in bed, they’ll drive to Deerfield, Massachusetts, and meander through the three-hundred-year-old village. From Deerfield, they’ll head to Hanover, New Hampshire, to have lunch at Dartmouth (Mitzi’s father, Joe, played basketball for Dartmouth in 1953 and Mitzi has always felt an affinity for the place), and then they’ll drive to Stowe, Vermont, and stay at the Topnotch, a resort. From Stowe, it’s up to Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom to spend the night in St. Johnsbury. From there, they’ll go to Franconia Notch State Park, where they’ll ride the Cannon Mountain Aerial Tramway for the ultimate in foliage viewing. They’ll end with a night in charming Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a town Kelley thinks is possibly the best-kept secret in America. He has arranged for a couple’s massage in front of the fire, for them to go apple-picking, on a hayride, out to dinners at fine country inns where bottles of champagne will be chilled and waiting on the tables, and for a personal yoga instructor in Stowe and then again in Portsmouth. He has made a mix of Mitzi’s favorite songs to play on the drive, and he’s packing up pumpkin muffins and his famous snack mix (secret ingredient: Bugles!) in case they get hungry on the road.

In the screen of the rear-view mirror I watched the cars climbing the access ramp on to the motorway behind us, eager arrivals at this aerial carnival.