Vollmer has
entered a strange phase. He spends all his time at the window now,
looking down at the earth. He says little or nothing. He simply wants
to look, do nothing but look. The oceans, the continents, the
archipelagos. We are configured in what is called a cross-orbit series
and there is no repetition from one swing around the earth to the next.
He sits there looking. He takes meals at the window, does checklists at
the window, barely glancing at the instruction sheets as we pass over
tropical storms, over grass fires and major ranges. I keep waiting for
him to return to his prewar habit of using quaint phrases to describe
the earth. It's a beach ball, a sun-ripened fruit. But he simply looks
out the window, eating almond crunches, the wrappers floating away. The
view clearly fills his consciousness. It is powerful enough to silence
him, to still the voice that rolls off the roof of his mouth, to leave
him turned in the seat, twisted uncomfortably for hours at a time. The view is
endlessly fulfilling. It is like the answer to a lifetime of questions
and vague cravings. It satisfies every childlike curiosity, every muted
desire, whatever there is in him of the scientist, the poet, the
primitive seer, the watcher of fire and shooting stars, whatever
obsessions eat at the night side of his mind, whatever sweet and dreamy
yearning he has ever felt for nameless places faraway, whatever
earth-sense he possesses, the neural pulse of some wilder awareness, a
sympathy for beasts, whatever belief in an immanent vital force, the
Lord of Creation, whatever secret harboring of the idea of human
oneness, whatever wishfulness and simplehearted hope, whatever of too
much and not enough, all at once and little by little, whatever burning
urge to escape responsibility and routine, escape his own
overspecialization, the circumscribed and inward-spiraling self,
whatever remnants of his boyish longing to fly, his dreams of strange
places and eerie heights, his fantasies of happy death, whatever
indolent and sybaritic leanings, lotus-eater, smoker of grasses and
herbs, blue-eyed gazer into space-- all these are satisfied, all
collected and massed in that living body, the sight he sees from the
window. "It is just so
interesting," he says at last. "The colors and all."
The colors and all.
- Excerpt from
Human Moments in World War III, by Don DeLillo