Abstract

Observing from on high what from below remains unseeable is discussed and described in this article, examining specific instances in the writings of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the novelist Marcel Proust, the earthwork artist Robert Smithson, and the author’s own 2012 art installation undertaken at the University of Toronto. In each case, an airplane offers a staging ground for the imagining of a more expansive kind of sight: one that, in the final account, may leave the one seeing caught and divided in the lofty dream of panoramic perception. With such imagined flight, one leaves the world while never having left it, living in its place a Hamletic dream of elevation and escape that keeps one securely “bounded in a nutshell … a king of infinite space.”

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