There was a piece on LRC Friday, August 29, "Where the Rubber Meets the Sky," from the New York Times of August 28. It told of a 78-year-old WW II vet, Bob Bender, who often treks from his home in Mineola, Long Island, to Hangar B at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn to fly small, rubber-powered model airplanes.
The Times article, by Vincent LaForet, is what journalists call a soft feature. It was a beautiful piece of reporting. I think that is true not just because it resonated so strongly with me, but because what was brilliantly conveyed in this story of a dedicated man is what I am calling for this piece the essence of flight.
I am using the term essence in a particular way and will come back to that.
But first to talk about my own reaction. I am a bit older than Mr. Bender, but I know where he is coming from, as people say nowadays. I started building rubber-powered models about 1930, when I too was seven, and kept at it until I went to college. I have since returned to the hobby a few times, but the last time was perhaps more than 20 years ago. Mr. Bender has got me salivating to get started again.
When I built a model for my son when he was about ten, I thought I should get with the latest thing and made a gas-powered job. We went down to the local field and powered up. (This was a first – and as it turned out – last time for me. I had got out of the game when gas power was just coming into it back in the late 30s.)
We let the model take off and watched it climb . . . and climb and climb, and disappear into the void. I had ignored some instructions about installing a fuse to detach the tail after a certain period of flight, which I thought needlessly complicated and mysterious. We never saw that plane again, and my son was understandably not converted. He returned to baseball and fishing.
I realized much later, contemplating this fiasco, that I really did not dig gas engines. Guys my age and some younger ones, all over this country, and in many other nations, make gas-powered model planes of almost incredible finish and sophistication and fly them outdoors at often quite elaborately outfitted airdromes. But I am no longer tempted, as I once was, to get into that end of the hobby.
I did have a brief period after the gas engine disaster of making "peanuts," as the little 12-inch wingspan planes like the ones Bender flies are known to enthusiasts. I never found a proper place to fly them indoors, however, and they don't do well in wind. Now I want to get back into it. Why?
Well, let me try to say. You have ingredients that cost at most a few dollars. (Back in the 1930s it was a matter of pennies.) You need only a few tools. The secret of success is not in money but in craft and understanding something about aerodynamics. It's skill, not power. And success, watching a tiny plane fly around in circles and glide back down to the ground, is somehow a uniquely satisfying experience. One has flown. One has experienced the essence of flight, and that, like the intuition of any essence, is a brush with the eternal, with something that is always the same and always true.
LaForet's piece on Bender includes these lines:
"Mr. Bender allows each [of the youngsters who come to watch him fly his planes] to choose a plane and guides them through winding the [rubber] motors, each with that precise number of turns. Then he walks them to a clear spot and let's them set the planes free. u2018You should see the look on the kids' faces,' he said, u2018when they fly those planes.'"
I know what they are feeling. I can still feel it. They have experienced a genuine marvel, not available, I do believe, to any human beings before the Wrights. It seems to be something a little beyond simple imagination, and I think it goes over into a realm that is difficult for me to write about, probably because my thoughts about it are only half formed.
At this point I have to veer off on a tangent. In recent months I have read a ferocious amount of Internet and periodical commentary and reached the point finally where I could see that my absorption in the war and the D.C. follies was (a) getting in the way of the work I am supposed to be doing, and (b) keeping me more or less constantly upset and furious about the barbarisms and betrayals du jour. I was gagging on the menu of horrors being served up by our leaders and suffering from a sense of total impotence to do a damn thing about any of them.
Not long ago, in a fight-back posture, and without, certainly, giving up on my daily fix of insights from LRC, I decided to start spending a lot more time reading books. You know, the lasting, permanent kind of thing. Not long after that I bumped once again into the phenomenon of the Spanish-American philosopher Santayana.
I have long had a copy of Irwin Edman's excellent 1936 "Baedeker" to Santayana's writings, The Philosophy of George Santayana, and have read Santayana's best-selling 1936 novel, The Last Puritan, several times over the last 50 years. This last had a special appeal to my Boston-bred brothers and me because, besides being an intensely moving story of the whole life of a New England youth killed in WW I, it is also an enormously circumstantial, skillful, and ironic send-up of the "Boston scene," which delighted us "Irish boys" because it took so unseriously the ponderously serious Boston-Cambridge intellectual scene.
But I do not bring up Santayana here to go off on a critique of him or a mini-biography, but rather to say that I have become at last a halfway serious student of his work. I have bought a whole bunch of his books from the online booksellers and will buy more as funds permit. My present view, which has been developing over recent weeks, is that he is one of the most consistent, honest, readable and profound of 20th century philosophers, as well as one of the most ignored and underrated. I notice that his books sell secondhand at remarkably low prices.
I am working toward trying to grasp his concept of essences, which I know he did not consider existences. That is, he said, essences do not "exist." All existence is a flowing, a becoming; whereas essence (I hope I have this right) is true Being. It, as it were, rides over and sums existence, and is, if you will, superior to it, or at least it is fixed and unchangeable, not subject to the universal flux.
Well, as you can plainly see I am not the man, at least not just now, to tell you what George Santayana was saying in his late work, The Realm of Essence. But I had an intuition that I trust, and which constitutes for me what I consider real learning, when I read that piece about model plane builder Bender and reflected on my own experience, vivid to me as I write this.
I am convinced that both in the article and in my recollections, I perceive an essence, the distillation of experience into permanence and unforgettable truth.
September 1, 2003
