Into Thin Air
Illustration
Stories
According to Acts 1:9, as the disciples watched, Jesus “…was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. I’m not sure they saw the exact moment he disappeared, because the passage continues, “While he was going, and they were gazing up towards heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them…” who proceeded to scold them for not following Jesus’ last words to return to Jerusalem and wait for the Holy Spirit.
It seems as if, when Jesus departed, the apostles struggled for words to describe his disappearance. If they spoke English instead of Aramaic, perhaps they might have said Jesus rose “into thin air.”
This got me to thinking about the phrase “into thin air.” It’s interesting that we call air thin, just because it isn’t really visible to us. We see right through air — though not always through the particles of pollution that nestle in our atmosphere and cause us to wheeze and cough.
Indeed, the winds carry the clouds along their journeys across our globe, drenched with moisture that can gently touch our faces but sometimes the winds are powerful enough to fill the gullies and create torrential rivers that scrape away the landscape, flood cities, and send mudslides careening down mountainsides.
One would think air is so thin as to be non-existent in outer space, where our satellites spin around the globe at around 17,500 miles per hour, but even hundreds of miles above the planet the few molecules of atmosphere present in these thinnest of airs provide enough resistance to degrade the orbits of spacecraft and send them hurtling to a fiery death as they plunge back to earth.
The Mars helicopter Ingenuity, which was launched towards the red planet with the rover Perseverance in 2020 and landed in 2021, required a unique design that allowed its propellers to spin fast enough and purposefully enough to lift the craft, nineteen inches high and just under four pounds in weight, into the Martian atmosphere which is1% as thick as the Earth’s! Although only built to perform five flights, it continues to perform far beyond expectations, still bopping up and down, filming the terrain to help mission planners chart the safest course for Perseverance as it plots its way across the jumbled landscape of the Jzeero Crater. Thin air indeed!
Into Thin Air is also the title of the 1997 best seller by Jon Krakauer, about the ill-fated commercial expedition to Mount Everest. Krakauer was brought along to chronicle the event, and summited the world’s highest peak May 10, 1996. Within hours, an entirely predictable storm struck in which nine lives were lost, and he blamed less the harsh conditions in the death zone, as climbers call the region above 28,000 feet, and more the inevitable consequence of what a journey into thin air does to a human’s ability to make rational choices. He chronicled the bad decisions by both experienced leaders and novice climbers on that day, including his own poor choices.
One of the more heroic passages involves the extremely risky, and what was considered the impossible helicopter rescue of Beck Weathers, a pathologist who was left for dead by the others after he spent the night outdoors in the dead zone unprotected from the storm which enveloped them. When he staggered into camp the next day, seemingly resurrected after a vision that implored him to get up and move, he was nearly blind, with frostbit hands and feet that made the final descent through the Khumbu Ice Falls from camp two to base camp impossible. Only the heroic efforts by Nepalese helicopter pilots who belonged to a Legion of Honor that impelled them to attempt to climb and land at an impossible altitude made the flight into thin air possible.
As you might guess, the first use of the phrase “into thin air” is first found in the works of William Shakespeare. In one of his final plays, “The Tempest,” Prospero, the rightful and former Duke of Milan, was first deposed and set adrift in a boat by his evil bother. His only companion was his infant daughter Miranda. Now, years later, Prospero has created an empire of magic on a deserted island. In order to entertain Miranda, now full grown, and cement her relationship with the shipwrecked son of his enemy so they might fall in love and be married, Prosper conjures up a pageant featuring Juno, Ceres, and Iris. Suddenly, when he is distracted by his enemies, all the actors vanish, alarming his audience. Prospero reassures them that, “These our actors…were all spirits, and are melted into air, into thin air.” (Tempest Act IV, Scene 1, l. 150)
But Jesus, of course, does not disappear into thin air, but the substantial reality of heaven, leaving his disciples — and us — temporarily in the true illusion, reality as we experience it, which will one day give way to the awesome expanse of eternity.
It seems as if, when Jesus departed, the apostles struggled for words to describe his disappearance. If they spoke English instead of Aramaic, perhaps they might have said Jesus rose “into thin air.”
This got me to thinking about the phrase “into thin air.” It’s interesting that we call air thin, just because it isn’t really visible to us. We see right through air — though not always through the particles of pollution that nestle in our atmosphere and cause us to wheeze and cough.
Indeed, the winds carry the clouds along their journeys across our globe, drenched with moisture that can gently touch our faces but sometimes the winds are powerful enough to fill the gullies and create torrential rivers that scrape away the landscape, flood cities, and send mudslides careening down mountainsides.
One would think air is so thin as to be non-existent in outer space, where our satellites spin around the globe at around 17,500 miles per hour, but even hundreds of miles above the planet the few molecules of atmosphere present in these thinnest of airs provide enough resistance to degrade the orbits of spacecraft and send them hurtling to a fiery death as they plunge back to earth.
The Mars helicopter Ingenuity, which was launched towards the red planet with the rover Perseverance in 2020 and landed in 2021, required a unique design that allowed its propellers to spin fast enough and purposefully enough to lift the craft, nineteen inches high and just under four pounds in weight, into the Martian atmosphere which is1% as thick as the Earth’s! Although only built to perform five flights, it continues to perform far beyond expectations, still bopping up and down, filming the terrain to help mission planners chart the safest course for Perseverance as it plots its way across the jumbled landscape of the Jzeero Crater. Thin air indeed!
Into Thin Air is also the title of the 1997 best seller by Jon Krakauer, about the ill-fated commercial expedition to Mount Everest. Krakauer was brought along to chronicle the event, and summited the world’s highest peak May 10, 1996. Within hours, an entirely predictable storm struck in which nine lives were lost, and he blamed less the harsh conditions in the death zone, as climbers call the region above 28,000 feet, and more the inevitable consequence of what a journey into thin air does to a human’s ability to make rational choices. He chronicled the bad decisions by both experienced leaders and novice climbers on that day, including his own poor choices.
One of the more heroic passages involves the extremely risky, and what was considered the impossible helicopter rescue of Beck Weathers, a pathologist who was left for dead by the others after he spent the night outdoors in the dead zone unprotected from the storm which enveloped them. When he staggered into camp the next day, seemingly resurrected after a vision that implored him to get up and move, he was nearly blind, with frostbit hands and feet that made the final descent through the Khumbu Ice Falls from camp two to base camp impossible. Only the heroic efforts by Nepalese helicopter pilots who belonged to a Legion of Honor that impelled them to attempt to climb and land at an impossible altitude made the flight into thin air possible.
As you might guess, the first use of the phrase “into thin air” is first found in the works of William Shakespeare. In one of his final plays, “The Tempest,” Prospero, the rightful and former Duke of Milan, was first deposed and set adrift in a boat by his evil bother. His only companion was his infant daughter Miranda. Now, years later, Prospero has created an empire of magic on a deserted island. In order to entertain Miranda, now full grown, and cement her relationship with the shipwrecked son of his enemy so they might fall in love and be married, Prosper conjures up a pageant featuring Juno, Ceres, and Iris. Suddenly, when he is distracted by his enemies, all the actors vanish, alarming his audience. Prospero reassures them that, “These our actors…were all spirits, and are melted into air, into thin air.” (Tempest Act IV, Scene 1, l. 150)
But Jesus, of course, does not disappear into thin air, but the substantial reality of heaven, leaving his disciples — and us — temporarily in the true illusion, reality as we experience it, which will one day give way to the awesome expanse of eternity.
