1. The Wright brothers' airplane flight (1903)
From the time of Daedalus,
the mythological inventor-artist whose wax wings imaged
flight as freedom, visionaries have taken to the air as a matter of
course. Orville and
Wilbur Wright made flight tangible and gave it to the world.
It is no accident that the airplane makes it onto the pages of such
literary classics as Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past
and Virginia Woolf's
Mrs. Dalloway as the very symbol of the modern age.
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Michael Seidel
is a Professor in the
Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His Top
10 list reflects a broad historical approach. He also discusses the impact of
the great events on writers, artists, and humanity in general.
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