There are dozens of reasons, many good, not to go for a ride in a hot air balloon. These might range from contingent factors like poor weather or lack of access, to more essential but also essentially subjective factors such as the fear of heights or plain lack of interest. None of these objections are wrong, and neither is the moderate view that it might, after all, be nice, but not nicer than anything else that’s nice, so that in the end you wouldn’t do it. But down on the ground are also some of what might be called accidental non-balloonists, who want to fly, who wouldn’t balk at the rental, but who despite that, even in fine weather, regard it all as too much trouble. Perhaps they’re perfectionists, distractible, or weak-willed, feeling undeserving—there’s no need for fine taxonomies here, except to say that it is to this latter group that I belong, the group of flightless birds with wings that work. In theory, I want to, I can, I even ought to, but up to now, I haven’t.
In spite of my best efforts at introspection, this flightlessness has had for me the character of inert fact. I’ve rifled the soul area repeatedly for any conscious or unconscious objection to flight and found none. Yet at the end, which will come, I would be very unsurprised to die having never gone up in a balloon. All that would have to happen is for tomorrow to be like today a few times, until there are no more of them. A true balloonist might see such a life as making a rhyme with the slothful Belacqua, whom Dante encounters in purgatory. Dante was a balloonist before his time; he once described the sky as a “sapphire sea.” To sail on it is precisely the point.
I only know about Dante because I have a friend by that name, Belacqua. B is the only person I’ve met who claims not to enjoy music, and as far as possible, never to have listened to it intentionally. He goes too far in his refusal, I think. He seems actually opposed to it, like Casaubon. I have a whole theory of it. It isn’t a very interesting theory: I think he’s anhedonic, depressed, and rationalizing that. But I don’t press the matter, because I have no solution for him, and nothing is worse than insight without relief.
What I couldn’t resist saying anyway is that it can be very consoling to take a grim orientation for honesty, because then your misery becomes your dignity. You alone have withstood the bitter medicine. You alone have the truth, and since everything else is ruin, you’ve got the only thing anyone can have. I think it would be very dangerous to remove that consolation all at once. I’m not sure what I could put in its place. Possible that medication would loosen the knot? B prefers exercise and soldierly discipline.
When I think of a life like B’s, without music, I see a life in some way unlived or failed. I don’t think that’s a particularly controversial attitude, a minimal form of epicureanism, with a small E. Maybe that’s an odd choice of words. I think most people would agree with me about B, but I also think most people would reserve the term epicurean for someone who holds this view not only of subnormal musical experiences like B’s but also of ordinary ears like mine. Jim, for example, once told me that he regards a life without a true appreciation of Brahms in the same way that I might regard a life without music in it at all, and that therefore I was in no position to judge B. I wasn’t sure if he was exaggerating, but it did seem possible that Jim saw me the way I see B. I wondered too at how he said it, as though we didn’t both know B. It isn’t theoretical. It’s like they’re invisible to one another.
Even Jim, however, doesn’t go too far. To see how far he goes, I might define a maximally epicurean person to be one who holds the intensest and best realization of some domain of experience, say, music, as the meaning of life, without qualification. A peak-experience chaser. We can easily imagine a man who bankrupts himself going to the opera every night, or an obsessive pianist who ruins his hands by over-practicing. Jim doesn’t do anything like that, so he must not hold the maximal theory, though nothing that he says ever contradicts it. He seems to be moderate in all things, including his epicureanism, which probably brings it closer to the classical meaning of the term, about which the less said the better, if only for reasons of time. Actual balloonists are, I think, mostly epicureans of this moderate variety.
There are certain excellent wines which, owing to their special process and miniature scale of production, are never exported. Pictures arrive from France; the gourmands are traveling as a pair of couples, with a playful suggestion of scandal. If you don’t travel, they say, you will never taste this wine. That’s true enough. But a certain sort of gourmand will go on to say, hyperbolically, that if you haven’t tasted this stuff, then you haven’t lived. The absolute gourmand is the man who means it.
Just as there are very few absolute gourmands, who would stop at nothing to taste even the decayed, the deadly, or the forbidden, there are very few absolute balloonists. It’s the difference between a mere restaurant connoisseur, who nowadays might photograph his food or publish an essay about why he’s stopped photographing his food as part of a “digital detox,” and the man who would risk his life to taste casu martzu, blowfish, certain protected whales. Or, say, the flesh of man. This sort of edgy eating is constantly brought up in a tittering way by people who imagine someone with stronger desires than themselves must be a moral wild card, or even that a high degree of epicureanism is a matter of the strength of desire rather than a differing evaluation of its importance. I think we’re very ordinary. Just a matter of knowing what matters.
In the absolute balloon, it seems we would reach some hard limits very quickly. Only a handful of crewed balloons have reached even the beginning of the stratosphere, and in many of these cases the ballooning was only the setup for a record-setting jump, not an end in itself. The current record is held by a technology executive, Alan Eustace, who in 2014 plummeted forty-one kilometers in four and a half minutes, having ascended in a specially made balloon and wearing an equally specialized pressure suit. Fine, but that’s just money.
In the upper atmosphere, the air gets very thin and cold and the pressure is near zero, so the suit is a serious matter. Is it possible that, like divers, we could get the bends going up too fast? It seems possible to go a bit farther than Eustace, but not much farther. Thermosphere jumps, especially beyond the rather arbitrarily defined Kármán line, marking the beginning of “space,” seem completely out of the question for a crewed balloon, even if a small number of weather balloons have reached that height. In any case, even to ascend to the stratosphere seems to change the mood of ballooning: one begins to feel like an astronaut or a fighter-jet pilot, or, like Eustace, a record-setting jumper. Ideally it ought to be possible to preserve the moustachioed nineteenth-century charm of Jules Verne’s adventures, which had more innocence and less of the ego about them, not to mention less of Major Tom.
To me, this kind of record setting is a parody of the absolute balloonist’s ethics of experiencing, which has as little to do with maximizing altitude by all technological and financial means as the ultragourmand has to do with gluttony. The absolute epicure prefers just the right portion of unicorn charcuterie and wouldn’t prefer it if you found an ortolan the size of a turkey. Portion setting is part of the aesthetic experience, and while there may be something delectably wrong about eating caviar from a pig’s trough and bathing in vintage Madeira, the wrongness nearly always outweighs the delectation. Such experiences are occasionally whispered, but no one does it twice, and few even once. It’s a matter of the fullness of experience, not of its quantifiable intensity.
I find it difficult to give a clear account of this fullness, but it seems related less to satiating an urge than to a kind of information. Our delight, per the most reflective of the balloonists and gourmands alike, may be in the experiencing apparatus itself.
I am, as I mentioned before, at least up to now an accidental non-balloonist. Since I’ve never been in one, the epicurean question for me takes the form:
“Just how disappointed ought I to be if in my whole life it never happens, or that it never has?”
According to the provisional taxonomy we’ve arrived at so far, if I were minimally epicurean, I would feel I was missing out; moderately, I would feel my life had taken some definite wrong turn; and if I were an absolute balloonist, as I sometimes suspect that I am, I might feel that my existence on Earth was no life at all.
In any of the three cases, I wouldn’t feel this sense of wrongness or disappointment every day. The best way, probably, to determine my feelings on ballooning would be to just go on as I have been, without disturbing anything, and to take note of any feelings of desolation that arise, recording their strength. That I haven’t done so up to now reflects either my unscientific character or the same pitiful irresolution and distractibility that has prevented me, to date, from driving the three hours to the field, chartering a balloon, and ascending the sapphire sea, as my friends on the ground, who I consider thwarted balloonists at best, lose specificity, then being, becoming specks, then green.
Of course I wouldn’t be alone. They’d never let you do it alone, not at the field, for insurance reasons, even if they know very well that you know how to fly safely. Skydiving is the same way. I’d have to spend the whole time talking to the jaded, friendly tour-guide character, or tell him to be silent, which would be its own agony. I think I’d feel approximately as guilty about silencing as I would for tipping him over the edge, through a cloud so I didn’t have to see him hit the ground. No, we’d have to talk. I’d have to explain why I’d never done it before, and have the basics of the subject explained to me by a man who probably takes no true interest in ballooning himself and knows less about it than I do. Ballooning, for him, may be merely a summer job or the family business or something for a story. Dante had Virgil, whose best quality might have been his walking on quietly ahead. There are no Virgils here. So when I go I will have to go alone, and with my own equipment.
I called B on the phone again, and again we talked about balloons. He has some aviation experience as it turns out—small craft, that’s his military background—and he’d recently been hang gliding. He insisted that I ought to do that instead, that to go up in a balloon was worse because it’s passive—I don’t think it is, but it’s true that you can’t steer—and he offered that I could come with him. His whole life, he said, was passive now, and it was important to have hobbies that weren’t. They had to confirm a feeling of agency, and of athletic resistance. Of Life, he said, and I could tell when he said it that he capitalized the word. As far as I can tell, Life means lifting weights.
I don’t think he takes steroids, so right there you can tell he doesn’t go all the way to the limit with it. It struck me that B’s relationship to athletic resistance and maneuver was like Jim’s relationship to music: in both cases only moderately epicurean. Ordinary people, slightly dialed up. To each, what others call ordinary life is a failure. In fact, each sees the other that way. Not even the extraordinary escapes condemnation. Trouble is, they’re dilettantes.
I’d like to reconcile B and Jim, because I think the world needs both of them very much. Although Jim only listens to records and doesn’t add to music or even write criticism, I conceive of his life as part of the life of Culture which has a big C for him, just as Life, for B, has a big L. I have no special love for Culture or for Life, but I do depend on them being there tomorrow. I’m pretty sure that if no one loved music immoderately, no one would teach it or play it well. And those who love it absolutely don’t teach. Perhaps they don’t play either, they simply cry over their Suzuki books, finding the sound too beautiful.
In order to understand Jim, I’ve begun to listen to recordings of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s Brahms lieder. When I told him this, he immediately shot me a text message asking whether I was streaming or really listening and what kind of headphones I had.
There must be people in this world with ears like Jim’s, entirely uncultivated, who live joyless lives because their ear is too perfect for any ordinary music. I suppose if that were you, Jim’s snobbery would be a gift, something that could set you on a path to realizing the perfection that you had up to that moment not known but had nonetheless obscurely belonged to. There’s something beautiful about that, the discovery of an order which all along was the secret meaning of your dissatisfaction. It’s with the hope that something like that would happen that I’ve always attached myself to people who are very severe and, in small ways, been enlightened by them, as in some Zen koans, with the stick.
What I always say is that it takes all kinds and all colors. But I wonder if I’m fooling myself about that. My pluralism of passions is at the end of the day a pluralism of very unpluralist intensities. I can’t even get my friends to like each other. Are Jim and B more honest than I am by just ignoring one another? And does it follow that I should ignore them?
I’d like to believe that Jim and B could recognize a common pursuit of intensity and the so-called peak experience. But in fact, abstract concepts like “experience” and “intensity” aren’t really a part of their lives, and perhaps it’s only verbally that they are part of mine. Jim and B live in complete contempt for one another—and for the rest of us, and to imagine them feeling otherwise is to imagine their edges slightly dulled. They would be different people. It stands to reason that from the standpoint of the absolute balloon, I ought to feel the same about their tiny lives down on the ground. Is there a particular altitude where that happens?
From the standpoint of the absolute balloon, a flightless life is as unlived as a life without sex, or without laughter, or as an always-dreamless sleep might be to someone who bothers with any of that. Of course, I specify out of politeness, these may be true lives too, but not—and this is the point—from the perspective of the absolute balloon, which I have here. Tomorrow, weather permitting, I will go up in it.