Oh, yes, I was there; I was there at the very beginning; even before the Heinkel-Hirth turbojet experiments. I'd always wanted to visit the moon myself, you see.

Of course I was also practical. As Heidegger writes: The upward glance passes aloft toward the sky, and yet it remains below on the earth [P. 220]. You're to young to understand the spiritual nature of flight becasue rockets and planes are everywhere now; flying's debased.

P. 77

In 1933, when the sleepwalker took power, I happened to be a philosophy student in Freiburg. It was night. We stood in a cricle outside the library, waiting. The command came. I was ready; I did my part. Liftoff! And so it rose and flew, gloriously propelled by human force; with indescribable joy I watched it spinning sharp-cornered like some strange new propeller device designed to cut the wires of enemy barrage ballons. I estimated its mass and velocity; I predicted its trajectory; I foresaw the duration of the flight down to the last second; I already knew the combustion temperatures involved. Just before it reached maximum altitude, it vanished for the merest eyeblink in the smoke that rose up all around us; next it entered the zone of pitiless light, first as a silhouette, then, once its descent had begun, it opened, revolving about its spinal axis with the print on its pages stark enough for me to read it, had I wanted to, all the way across the pyre--it was some Jew book, something about pacifism, I believe--and Professor Heidegger, now unanimously elected Rector since his Anglo-Bolshevik predecessor had resigned, was speaking to us, or shouting. I should say, his voice deep, exultant, and more certain than it had sounded in any lecture I'd ever heard; he was telling us all that this marked a new night for German culture; that the old must burn for the sake of the new.

P. 79

¶ 12:28 PM