FIRESIDE REFLECTIONS

Williams, Maj. Al

Fireside Reflections Br MAJ. AL WILLIAMS GROUNDED by bad weather on the Eastern Shore of Maryland—Sunday—alone before a huge, open fireplace heaped with logs blazing merrily while the wind and...

...Physically and mentally a human is never nearer to God than when traveling aloft and alone five, 10, 15 thousand feet above the world...
...The Gulfhawk is secured and snugged down, and so am I, sitting here with my typewriter balanced on my knees as my eyes roam from the words appearing before me to the fanciful shapes assumed by the flames curling around the blazing logs and reaching up the wide fireplace...
...Certainly not, but the killing would have to be in actual defense or for a real national cause...
...Why do we find contentment in gazing into a fire...
...Killing Must Have A Real Cause A voice interrupts, "Would you like to go duck shooting...
...In the place of these sharp edges are the softened lines of simple thinking...
...Nonetheless, they seem so normal to one looking into a blazing fireplace and to anyone accustomed to looking beyond and behind "things...
...Gone are the sharp edges of the "city mind"—razor blade edges born of necessity where men live uncomfortably close to one another and even in layers...
...Isn't it short-range thinking—a quick dividend urge, usually a quick money and honor • objective—rather than long-range thinking which fits us temporarily for war...
...Temporarily—all too true —and I must use every second...
...The Lack Of 'Distance Thinking' I don't suppose there is any earthly reason for writing such a column, written by one assigned to aviation reporting, and less reason for any editor's printing it...
...The world to him up there is land, air and water...
...A form of temporary insanity and madness...
...Isn't lack of "distance thinking" the cause of this war, like every other war, and of all our troubles...
...But, after all, are there real reasons why an airman should constantly indulge in reflective "distance thinking...
...winter trying to bluster his dominance of the season...
...Reflections born of flames in an open fireplace, with the outside ceiling "zero...
...Probably for the same reason we can sit for hours looking at the surf and the waves tumbling and rolling on a beach...
...Possibly these thoughts seem strange to those who regulate room temperatures by setting a thermostat or twisting a steam valve...
...I need it as the farmers here need this rain...
...The movement of natural forces probably contrasts pleasantly with our inactivity...
...Man, jealous of his own life duration, kills every other form of life he cannot dominate or use...
...Each wave is of different shape and so is each flame in an open fireplace...
...AL WILLIAMS GROUNDED by bad weather on the Eastern Shore of Maryland—Sunday—alone before a huge, open fireplace heaped with logs blazing merrily while the wind and rain beat viciously across Chesapeake Bay...
...AH is silence, except for the soft murmuring hum of the fire and the crackle as each new vein of the logs is opened by the flames...
...Calm Thinking Possible Here Reflection, calm thinking, is possible here...
...Except for his plane and motor, he spends hours far distant from all earthly things in limitless skies, sunlit altitudes that are bright for him while groundlings beneath the cloud ceilings grumble about the rain and fog and the sunless gloom...
...I see faces and places and memories and scenes of other times in these flames...
...He is riding that 15 feet of wing spread on each side and looking and seeing things 10 to 70 or more miles ahead and all around...
...Isn't it likely that some day, after enough generations of airmen have become accustomed to "seeing" distance, they may begin to "think" distance...
...Looking at vast open spaces between clouds, mountains of clouds, bright and dark gigantic cloud valleys, caverns and sky-blue ceilings in the fairyland above the horizon—or whole storms from aloft—or glimpses through the cloud floor of the distant, tiny evidences of human habitation—dots of smoke along the horizon's rim, which are called "cities" and "towns...
...the simplicity seeking to accommodate itself to the country life of which I am temporarily a part...
...Just curious reflections of an ordinary airman...
...None of the phonies I have heard yet would suffice...
...And if he can't use the killed life, he takes its skins and drapes them over his women or lays them around thrones or on any floor for decoration...
...Thank God for this day...
...No," comes a flat answer (followed by the habitual "thank you"), I'm not hungry...
...I don't need the ducks and killing them would be for sport and sport alone...
...Does this mean I am a confirmed pacifist and wouldn't kill an enemy airman...

Vol. 5 • December 1941 • No. 49


 
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