High Flight

When simple words touch our hearts

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Joos de Momper the Younger (Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 3.0)

“After midnight the moon set and I was alone with the stars. I have often said that the lure of flying is the lure of beauty, and I need no other flight to convince me that the reason flyers fly, whether they know it or not, is the aesthetic appeal of flying.” — Amelia Earhart, 1935

Today, January 28, marks the anniversary of the tragic end of the space shuttle Challenger, the first mission to carry a school teacher.

So it seems like the appropriate date to educate ourselves about a particular piece of communication from that date.

That evening, rather than giving the State of the Union address, President Ronald Reagan chose to address a nation that was grappling with collective grief, mourning the unexpected loss of those seven brave explorers.

The speech has gone down in history as one of the greats, referring to the human history of exploration and even noting the death of Sir Francis Drake on the very same date, nearly 400 years before.

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The four-minute speech is a remarkable piece of writing that managed to capture the moment with solemnity, sincerity, and poetry, closing with this paragraph: