My airplane is quiet, and for a moment still an alien, still a stranger to the ground, I am home.

The feeling I have when I get up there in the airplane is unlike anything else,"

Not the first time. I didn’t think my heart could stand it. But the airplane is a wonderful thing. You are still in one place when you arrive at the other. The airplane is faster than the heart. You arrive quickly and you leave quickly. You don’t grieve too much. And there is something else about the airplane. You can go back many times to the same place. And something strange happens if you go back often enough. You stop grieving for the past. You see that the past is something in your mind alone, that it doesn’t exist in real life. You trample on the past, you crush it. In the beginning it is like trampling on a garden. In the end you are just walking on ground. That is the way we have to learn to live now. The past is here.” He touched his heart. “It isn’t there.” And he pointed at the dusty road. I

Within the hour, I'll land, and strangely enough I'm in no hurry to have it pass. I haven't the slightest desire to sleep. My eyes are no longer salted stones. There's not an ache in my body. The night is cool and safe. I want to sit quietly in this cockpit and let the realization of my completed flight sink in. Europe is below; Paris, just over the earth's curve in the night ahead - a few minutes more of flight. It's like struggling up a mountain after a rare flower, and then, when you have it within arm's reach, realizing that satisfaction and happiness lie more in the finding than in the plucking. Plucking and withering are inseparable. I want to prolong this culminating experience of my flight. I almost wish Paris were a few more hours away. It's a shame to land with the night so clear and so much fuel in my tanks

Solitude is different from loneliness, and it doesn't have to be a lonely kind of thing.

She had preferred being on the plane, detached from the earth, the illusion of sitting still.

Solitude matters, and for some people it is the air that they breathe.

Lovers of air travel find it exhilarating to hang poised between the illusion of immortality and the fact of death.

And while it never felt like love or community, it had almost felt like not being alone.

I would recommend a solo flight to all prospective suicides. It tends to make clear the issue of whether one enjoys being alive or not.

"I think one travels more usefully when they travel alone, because they reflect more."

(Letter to John Banister, Jr., June 19, 1787)

Solitude is separate experience.

Privacy and loneliness were the traditional luxuries accorded to a skipper.

The loneliness of the man is slowly being borne in upon me. There is not a man aboard but hates or fears him, nor is there a man whom he does not despise.