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The Size of Spokane The baby isn't cute. In fact he's a homely little pale and headlong stumbler. Still, he's one of us—the human beings stuck on flight 295 (Chicago to Spokane); and when he passes my seat twice at full tilt this then that direction, I look down from Lethal Weapon 3 to see just why. He's running back and forth across a sunblazed circle on the carpet—something brilliant, fallen from a porthole. So! it's light amazing him, it's only light, despite some three and one half hundred people, propped in rows for him to wonder at; it's light he can't get over, light he can't investigate enough, however many zones he runs across it, flickering himself. The umpteenth time I see him coming, I've had just about enough; but then he notices me noticing and stops— one fat hand on my armrest—to inspect the oddities of me. Some people cannot hear. Some people cannot walk. But everyone was sunstruck once, and set adrift. Have we forgotten how astonishing this is? so practiced all our senses 56 we cannot imagine them? foreseen instead of seeing all the all there is? Each spectral port, each human eye is shot through with a hole, and everything we know goes in there, where it feeds a blaze. In a flash the baby's old; Mel Gibson's hundredth comeback seems less clever; all his chases and embraces narrow down, while we fly on (in our plain radiance of vehicle) toward what cannot stay small forever. 37 ...

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