WHEN I WAS A CHILD, THE MAKERS OF PUBLIC CULTURE in this country conspired to persuade me that people can’t fly. They did this by showing me flying people. After school I’d watch The Greatest American Hero on ABC, whose theme song (“Believe it or not—I’m walking on air!”) taught me that walking on air was incredible. Virginia Hamilton’s beloved collection of black folktales, The People Could Fly, taught me that flying was a vanished gift of other people’s ancestors. And every kid knew the advertising slogan for the 1978 Superman film, which promised the impossible: “You’ll believe a man can fly!”
In all these ways, I and every other American learned that people don’t fly—not in nonfiction, not in the publicly authorized reality of history textbooks and evening news. But the propaganda didn’t work. On the first page of Yale history professor Carlos Eire’s puckish new study of levitating and bilocating saints, frauds, and witches in the early modern era, which has the perfectly provocative title They Flew, he writes that it’s “absolutely impossible” for people to fly without the aid of technology, “and everyone can agree on this, for certain. Or at least everyone nowadays who doesn’t want to be taken for a fool or an unhinged eccentric.” Reading this line, I thought, What are you talking about? I doubt you could stand in any major urban center in this country and be more than a mile from somebody who believes that some people fly. Catholics believe that St. Teresa of Ávila floated; some Buddhists make similar claims for the Buddha; I’m in California right now and I guarantee somebody within a mile of me thinks y
Read Full Article »