Jasper County Democrat, Volume 21, Number 8, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 April 1918 — FIRST THOUGHT IS ISOLATION [ARTICLE]

FIRST THOUGHT IS ISOLATION

Aviator Longs for Sound of Human Voices When He Is Soaring Far Above the Earth. I became conscious of a feeling of loneliness, writes James N. Hall, in the Atlantic. I remembered what J. B. had said that morning. There was something unpleasant in that isolation, something to make one look longingly down to earth; to make one wonder whether we shall ever feel really at home in the air. I, too, longed for the sound of human voices, and all-that I heard was the roar of the motor and the swish of the wind through wires and struts —sounds which have no human quality in them, and are no more companionable than the lapping of the waves would be to a man adrift on a raft in midocean. Underlying this feeling, and, no doubt, in part responsible for it, was the knowledge of the fallibility of that seemingly perfect mechanism which rode so steadily through the air; of the quick response which that ingenious arrangement s of inanimate matter would , make to an. eternal and inexorable law, if a few frail wires should part; of the equally quick, but less phlegmatic response of another fallible mechanism, capable of registering horror, capable, it is said, of passing its past life in review in the space of a few seconds, and then — capable of becoming equally inanimate matter.