A Sea of Faces

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It’s very much like dying, I suppose. That awareness of infinite descent, that knowledge of the total absence of support. It’s all sky up here. Down below is neither land nor sea, only color without form, so distant that I can’t even put a name to the color. The cosmos is torn open, and I plummet headlong, arms and legs pinwheeling wildly, the gray stuff in my skull centrifuging toward my ears. I’m dropping like Lucifer. From morn to noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve, A summer’s day; and with the setting sun Dropp’d from the Zenith, like a falling star. That’s Milton. Even now my old liberal-arts education stands me in good stead. And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer, Never to hope again. That’s Shakespeare. It’s all part of the same thing. All of English literature was written by a single man, whose sly persuasive voice ticks in my dizzy head as I drop. God grant me a soft landing.

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