KRONFELD ON GLIDING AND SOARING.pdf - Lakes Gliding Club

20 KRONFELD ON GLIDING & SOARING
It is, of course, not easy to separate the grain of truth in
these stories from the heap of chaff under which an embellishing
imagination has buried them. It is no wonder that
people who witnessed the first attempts at flying should
be carried away by such startling spectacles and sacrifice
accuracy to poetic imagination in their accounts of them.
But to-day, when we often see gliders capable of carrying
men that have been put together out of laths and odd bits
of wood spanned with paper or cheap material, it becomes
easier to believe these stories.
But fantasy has its rightful place in the world. The poet
is a guardian, who watches over a new idea, so that it shall
not die. He fans to life the dying ashes of the human
spirit until he has created a flame in which technical knowledge
may forge discovery and progress.
From the legend of Simon Magus developed the Magus
Saga, with its fantastic flight to Rome. We also see in the
Dr. Faustus of the Middle Ages another personification
of man's will to attain the airy path to heaven. But much
time was yet to elapse before the aspiration could become
reality.
Goethe's Faust addresses the setting sun as follows :
" The glow retreats, done is the day of toil ;
It yonder hastes, new fields of life exploring.
Ah, that no wing can lift me from the soil,
Upon its track to follow, follow soaring !
Then would I see eternal Evening gild
The silent world beneath me glowing,
On fire each mountain peak, with peace each valley filled,
The silver brook to golden rivers flowing.
The mountain chain, with all its gorges deep,
Would then no more impede my godlike motion ;
And now before my eyes expands the ocean
With all its bays, in shining sleep !
Yet, finally, the weary god is sinking ;
The new-born impulse fires my mind,
I hasten on, his beams eternal drinking,
The day before me and the night behind,
Above me heaven unfurled, the floor of waves beneath me,