/pt/ – Petrarchan

Once I was onboard a plane that flew over my town on a clear day. I could pick out all the streets, all the parks and playgrounds. I could see my old school and my rugby club. I could even see my own street, and my own house, no larger than a piece from a Monopoly set. Genuinely an amazing experience, and especially exciting because it was a complete surprise.

For real, for any length of plane ride I just stare out the window like an idiot in wonder. People who close the shutter over it I just don't understand. The first time I saw that I was shook.

Maybe once or twice, when I'm tired and I've taken lots of flights in a short period of time, I will admit to having lost that wonder. But I try and rebuke myself. It should always be magic.

This is an affront to God. Men were never meant to understand just how small their lives really are.

lmao this guy thinks mountains aren't real or high buildings. the vastness was always there for the taking.

I had a similar experience a few months ago. despite being a pretty austere person usually I almost cried

meant for 257

Looking at citylights from a plane during night time is another beautiful experience. In the dark, at high altitude, there is hardly a sense of scale, and you can't decipher the lights down there. It could be a village or a megalopolis, there is no way to tell.

>>431 Transcendent experiences from out of the blue really are the thing that makes life worth living. >>442 I like when the lights creep around the edge of an ocean, whose alluring wine-dark presence is only implied by the negative space.

>>467 >ocean, whose alluring wine-dark presence is only implied by the negative space. I once flied all along the tibia of the Italian boot by night - that was it.

this is the central metaphor in 'Both Sides Now' by Joni Mitchell. "I've looked at clouds from both sides now." she was inspired to write it after reading a passage from 'Henderson the Rain King' by Saul Bellow in which iirc the character Henderson is on a plane contemplating pretty much the same thing as OP. I think she read that passage whilst she was also flying, then looked out the window, then wrote the lyrics.

>>256 This was unironically a stoic spiritual exercise for thousands of years. The idea of seeing the polis from above was supposed to inspire a transformation of private interests into humanitarian virtue. Many redditors will say the same thing today about "the overview effect" but I think that's fake and exaggerated by astronauts achieving a major career milestone.