Speeding

Recently we spent a class considering speed.

 

We used antonyms of  “slow” as a writing prompt. We read a poem by Dan Beachy-Quick that gives this partial line:

 

Your ears parenthesize nothing

 

And we wrote from a line  by US Air Force Captain Joseph Kittinger who stepped from the gondola of a helium balloon floating at an altitude of 31,330 m (102,800 feet). he wrote of his skydiving experience in August 1960:

 

No wind whistles or billows my clothing. I have absolutely no sensation of the increasing speed with which I fall. [The clouds] rushed up so chillingly that I had to remind myself they were vapor and not solid.