I don’t think I’ll ever become a commercial airline pilot but I’ll admit its tempting after reading Mark Vanhoenacker’s pilot memoir Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot. Some of my favorite parts of the book were descriptions of how the author’s understanding of the physical world has changed from being a pilot. I had never thought of it in the same way, but it felt similar to how my sense of place has changed by seeing cities from tall mountains. I’m sure my grasp of LA would be wholly different hand I not spent as much time viewing it from the tops of the nearby San Gabriels or the roof of Griffith Observatory. All the more reason to get that window seat on your next flight.

“Before I had become a pilot, if you had asked me to talk about a city I had visited, I might have thought first of its architecture, its food, or a memorable event from my first visit there. Now I tend to think first of its geographic situation: what it looks like from above and far away; whether it is on the edge of mountains or the sea or the desert; what ideas of land give way, like distance itself, to the fact of Vancouver or Milan. These are places that feel different to me even as I walk through them, because I know what it looks like to arrive in them from the sky. This is one of the satisfactions of my job that surprised me: not flight itself but this almost anachronistically literal awareness of how cities rest on the physical world.”