What the Crowd Calls Gravity

Most people carry, somewhere beneath the surface of an ordinary life, a want they have learned not to say out loud. It is rarely a want for anything practical. It is a want for something that looks, from any reasonable distance, like a poor use of a life: too narrow, too costly, too unlikely to reward the person chasing it. The people around that person can see the odds clearly. So can the person chasing it, usually more clearly than anyone, and they continue anyway.

There is a kind of face that belongs to people like this, though it is rarely a face at all by the time the work begins. In the portrait behind this essay, a man named Meisterling, a major in the United States Air Force, has disappeared behind engineering built for a single purpose. A white helmet stamped with the name of the laboratory that made it. Two black lenses where his eyes should be, dark enough to survive a light bright enough to blind a person permanently. A mask fitted over his mouth and strapped tight enough to hold at speed and altitude. Without the small tag near his collar, there would be no evidence that a particular man was inside any of it.

That disappearance is not an accident of the photograph. It is the price of the work. To be ready for what this man was preparing to be near, an earlier version of himself had to be set aside, first in training and then in practice, until the readiness became more trustworthy than nerve or instinct ever could be. Nobody ends up dressed like this by chance, and nobody stays dressed like this out of comfort.

“Ordinary work” is doing a great deal of work in the opening sentence. It is really just a name for what a large number of people have quietly agreed to expect from one another, over time, until the agreement starts to feel less like a habit and more like a law of the world. But it is not a law, although it behaves like one anyway, especially to a person trying to leave it. Someone who wants something far outside what looks reasonable to everyone around them feels that agreement as a pull: constant, mostly polite, always aimed at the shape of a life other people can recognize and approve of. Call it caution, call it concern for a person's own good. It is gravity, dressed up as the people who love you.

A rocket does not defeat gravity by refusing it. It defeats gravity by burning enough fuel, aimed in the right direction, for long enough, to finally exceed it. The first hundred feet of that climb look identical to failure, and so does the first hundred days of anyone trying to build a life around a want that almost nobody else believes is worth the trouble. The noise is enormous. The distance covered is small. For a long stretch there is no visible sign that the thing will ever clear the pull it was built to escape.

What holds a person to that climb is rarely the audacity that got them off the ground in the first place. Audacity is loud, and it does not last. What actually holds someone to a path that most people around them have already quietly written off is something far less impressive to watch: showing up again to the same unglamorous discipline on a day when the outcome is still nowhere in sight and there is no one around to reward the effort. Nobody watching would call that beautiful in the moment. It usually only looks that way afterward, once the shape of the whole climb becomes visible at once. Meisterling's helmet and mask are not dramatic objects in themselves. They are practice objects, built and worn and checked, over and over, long before the day they were made for ever arrived.

Then, if it works, something strange happens. The same gravity that spent years trying to pull the person back turns around and calls the result remarkable. The crowd that offered no shelter for the attempt finds plenty of applause for the outcome. This is less hypocrisy than relief, an admission that most people recognize, somewhere in themselves, the want they declined to follow, and are glad to be shown it may not have been foolishness after all.

Not everyone who wants something far outside the ordinary gets to clear the atmosphere. Some spend a lifetime burning fuel against a pull that never releases them, and that cost deserves to be especially honored in a story about destiny. Because the want itself, and the willingness to keep facing a long, unglamorous climb that most people would have abandoned by now, is already worth something, whether or not the sky ever opens above it. This portrait is, in the end, not a picture of a hero. It is a picture of a man who let a difficult thing take over his face and his entire being, on an ordinary morning before anyone, including him, knew whether it would work. Most people who are still somewhere on their own climb will recognize that morning. Some of them are living in it right now.