"It's London, 1923. Everyone suddenly looks up. Every one looked up. Dropping dead down the aeroplane soared straight up, curved in a loop, raced, sank, rose, and whatever it did, wherever it went, out fluttered behind it a thick ruffled bar of white smoke which curled and wreathed upon the sky in letters. Near the beginning of Mrs. Dalloway, an ordinary day is disrupted by a technological intrusion."
"A sky-writing airplane, quaint as it may seem at first glance, brings us news of our current situation about how we think, how we interact and how we experience reality. Originally published in 1925, Virginia Woolf's novel is about a single, hectic day in the life of an upper-class woman and a motley collection of her fellow Londoners. The book is an acknowledged classic, but what's startling about looking at it with 21st-century eyes is how modern it feels."
"The airplane, arcing across a scene in which Mrs. Dalloway herself barely figures, allows Woolf and the reader to experience the randomness, and also the curious coherence, of a speedy and fractured mode of existence. Twenty-first-century readers will be amazed at how familiar all that seems. So let's crane our necks with those long-ago Londoners and try to read the writing in the sky."
An aeroplane trails thick ruffled white smoke across the 1923 London sky, forming and erasing letters that arrest the attention of passersby. The brief spectacle intrudes on an ordinary day and functions as a technological interruption that exposes the randomness and curious coherence of a fast, fractured existence. The narrative centers on a single hectic day in the life of an upper-class woman and a motley collection of fellow Londoners, showing overlapping inner lives and fleeting communal experiences. For a few minutes strangers share collective attention, interpret the aerial letters differently, and glimpse how modern technologies reshape perception and social interaction.
Read at www.nytimes.com
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