Joshua Morrison on Barry Lopez's "Flight"

Starting out, I found myself a bit beleaguered wading through the mountain of technical jargon that permeates the piece. At first I believed the specifics were to merely lend some credibility to the narrator but as the story continued and the terminology pushed on perpetually, I came to believe that the language serves a more interactive purpose. Reading the technical material made me tired (I actually fell asleep for a while) and I believe the author wanted the audience to be weighed down with it. For a time I tried to keep up with it, attempting to learn everything I could about the aircraft and how everything functioned on and in it but very quickly I was overwhelmed, as was the narrator in traveling so much.

One thing that immediately struck me was the disconnect from nature and man’s need to not only conquer nature but to use it unnaturally to feed the desires of man. How ridiculous a thing is it to have “a fresh strawberry on a winter morning in Toronto” (309). The business like, calculating and financial language throughout the piece further distances the reader from the natural world while a sense of longing is continually expressed as the narrator looks down on the beauty of the world from above in this aircraft that could be seen as a symbol for man’s ridiculous and unnatural state; “the Boeing 747 is the one airplane every national airline strives to include in its fleet as confirmation of its place in modem commerce, and it’s tempting to see it as the ultimate embodiment of what our age stands for” (310).

The initial “PENGUINS AND LIPSTICK, STRAWBERRIES AND GOLD” (308) grabbed me and I sat for a while trying to find an immediate connection between them all. It wasn’t until I got to the very end, to the last sentence that I felt I understood, “I think the of the penguins two decks below, standing up on their toes and slamming flippers that once were wings against the walls of their pens” (333). The author states that the freighting industry is driven by three things, one of which is “…frequent changes in fashion and in the design of basic products.” Throughout the piece, exhaustive lists of cargo are ceaselessly shoveled to the reader, most of which being either basic consumer goods or money. I feel the sentence starting the story is a simply summery of the disconnection between man and nature as viewed by the narrator and attempts to illustrate how humanity has not only separated itself from the natural but also has taken advantage of the natural, placing everything (including those employed in the freighting industry) in a state of limbo, without time, and breaking everything and everyone down to a bare practical, numerical equation. I believe the “Gold” represents greed and a need to have more, probably the ultimate driving force behind the whole predicament. The “strawberries” illustrating man’s need to feed their own desire, no matter how ridiculous those desires may be. The “Lipstick” as a symbol of commercial and cultural influence, a show of the western world pushing needless objects on the world as a whole, destroying foreign cultures by homogenizing everything. Finally the “Penguins”, like humans they cannot fly and have been taken out of their natural habitat for nothing more than the desire of humans.

Paying close attention to things I have read this semester as well as “Flight” I have slowly begun to recognize patterns, or rather techniques, in writing. Not just in nonfiction but for writing in general which help illustrate points through context. These techniques may not be constrained to nonfiction but I feel that they are easily visible in it. I enjoy the way Mr. Lopez used his knowledge of planes and the freighting industry to wear down the audience so that they experience some of what he went through. Although tiring my reader may not be something I wish to do, it is a technique that I feel can be very effective. I also feel that taking these normal items (penguins, lipstick, gold and strawberries) and enlarging their environment and exposing the influence they have globally to demonstrate a greater human fault is another great technique I can utilize in my own writing.