Taking Off Read Online Free PDF Page A

somewhere in some direction, seems to come along as an afterthought, almost as if, once dropping slowly in my controlled fashion, I let myself be carried by a breeze, or by an inclination. Part of the pleasure of these dreams seems to come from this accidental aspect of flight, the notion that it seems to free me not only from the weight imposed by gravity but from the purposefulness imposed by a destination. I do not fly to get anywhere, but only to be a flier, or—simpler still—I fly because I am a flier.
    I also had daydreams of flying, waking dreams, wishes and fantasies, but they were quite different from my sleeping dreams of flying. My daydreams were about getting somewhere, or about getting away from where I was and flying to somewhere else. They were about escape and exploration, and they were deliberate. I launched my daydreams as I might have launched a flying machine. I got into the dream and took off. Often I launched one of these daydreams on a Sunday, when I was in the back seat of the family car, and my family was out for a Sunday drive.
    There were parkways on Long Island, highways built to resemble country roads, with bridges faced with rustic-cut stone, wooden railings and wooden dividers between the opposite lanes, light poles of wood, and landscaping that was designed to look as if the hand of man had not been involved in it. Parkways were ideal for a Sunday drive, the next best thing to a country road. These parkways still exist, but the density of the traffic has made them less attractive for a Sunday drive. The density of traffic has made the whole concept of the Sunday drive less attractive.
    On either side of the parkway’s roadway, running alongside it, there was a pathway. I think that I am right in saying that I never saw anyone walking along one of those pathways, and it occurs to me now that the paths may have been provided more as an element of landscaping than as a way that was intended for actual use by hikers or bicyclists. They were, perhaps, intended to heighten or strengthen the impression of driving along a country road by evoking the notion of a footpath that one might walk or hike with rucksack and alpenstock, or to provide the expectation that one might while driving see someone else doing the hiking, a generous someone who thus completed the country-road impression while allowing the driver and passengers to remain comfortably seated in the family car.
    For the boy sitting in the back seat of my family’s car, the pathway was more interesting than the roadway. It wandered a bit, for one thing. The road may have been made to resemble a country road, but its route had been laid out to eliminate as far as possible anything that stood in the driver’s way, including the hills and turns that make a country road a pleasant meander. The land beside the roadway had not been flattened as the roadway had. In fact, I think that if I were to take the trouble to do the research, I would find that it had been deliberately contoured to give the illusion of land in a natural state, uneven, untamed, and that when the little pathway had been built the landscapers had made it meander, within limits, like a miniature of the country road that the parkway was intended to suggest. The path had its ups and downs, its meanders and rambles and digressions. It had stretches that seemed a bit off course. Now and then it would disappear from view behind a clump of trees, becoming all the more attractive for having disappeared.
    As we rolled along the parkway, I followed the pathway with my eyes, and in my daydreams I imagined moving along the pathway in a kind of hovercraft. It rose no more than a couple of feet above the surface, but it flew, though I have no idea how. As it flew, it was utterly silent, since it was powered by wishful thinking, by my powerfully propulsive wish to be out of the back seat of the family car.

Chapter 7
    On Intention and Travel
    ALBERTINE AND I ROLLED ON, in the