Out of the play "
Angels in America"
"Night flight to San Francisco.
Chase the moon across America. God!
It's been years since I was on a plane!
When we hit thirty-five thousand feet,
we'll have reached the tropopause.
The great belt of calm air. As close as I'll
ever get to the ozone.
I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause,
the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone..
which was ragged and torn, pathces of it threadbare
as old cheescloth..and that was frightening..
But I saw something on I could see, because of my
astonishing ability to see such things.
Souls were rising from the earth far below.
Souls of the dead, of people who had perished
from famine, from war, from the plague.
And they all floated up like
skydivers in reverse
limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning.
And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped
ankles, and formed a web. A great net of souls.
And the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules, of the stuff of ozone.
And the outerim absorbed them. And was repaired.
Nothing's lost forever. In this world, there is a kind of
painful progress. Longing for what we've left
behind, and dreaming ahead.
Atleast that what I think so.