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SESSION TWO
PART A
Directions: Read the passages on the
following pages (a memoir and an essay).
Write the number of the answer, to each
multiple-choice question on your answer
sheet. Then write the essay in your
essay booklet as described Your Task. You may
use the margins to
take notes as you read and scrap paper to plan your response.
Your Task:
After you have read the passages
and answered the multiple-choice
questions, write a unified essay about the discovery of beauty.
In
your essay, use ideas from both passages to establish a
controlling
idea about the discovery of beauty. Using evidence from each
passage, develop your controlling idea and show how the
author
uses specific literary elements or techniques to convey that idea.
PASSAGE 1
Idly, paying scant
attention, I saw a medium-sized, rugged man dressed in
brown leather, all begoggled, climb in a black biplane's open
cockpit. The plane
was a Bucker Jungman, built in the thirties. I saw a tall,
dark-haired woman seize
a propeller tip at the plane's nose and yank it down till the
engine caught. He was
(5)
Off; he climbed high over the airport in his biplane, very high
until he was barely
visible as a mote, and then seemed to fall down the air, diving
headlong, and
streaming beauty in spirals behind him.
The black plane dropped
spinning, and flattened out spinning the other way;
it began to carve the air into forms that built wildly and musically
on each other
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and never ended. Reluctantly, I started paying attention. The pilot,
Dave Rahm,
drew high above the world an inexhaustibly glorious line; it piled
over our heads
in loops and arabesques.
The air show announcer
hushed. He had been squawking all day, and now he
quit. The crowd stilled. Even the children watched dumbstruck as the
Slow, black
(15)
biplane buzzed its way around the air. Rahm made beauty with his
whole body; it
was pure pattern, and you could watch it happen. The plane moved
every way a
line can move, and it controlled three dimensions, so the line
carved massive and
subtle slits in the air like sculptures. The plane looped the loop,
seeming to arch
its back like a gymnast; it stalled, dropped, and spun out of it
climbing; it spiraled
(20)
and knifed west on one side's wings and back east on another; it
turned
cartwheels, which must be physically impossible; it played with its
own line like a cat
with yarn. How did the pilot know where in the air he was? If he got
lost, the
ground would swat him.
Rahm did everything his
plane could do: tailspins, four-point rolls, flat spins,
(25)
figure 8's, snap rolls, and hammerheads. He did pirouettes on the
plane's tail.
The other pilots could do these stunts, too, skillfully, one at a
time. But Rahm used the
plane inexhaustibly, like a brush marking thin air,
His was pure energy and
naked spirit, I have thought about it for years. Rahm's
line unrolled in time. Like music, it split the bulging rim of the
future
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along its seam. It pried out the present. We watchers waited for the
split-second
curve of beauty in the present to reveal itself. The human pilot,
Dave Rahm,
worked in the cockpit right at the plane's nose; his very body tore
into the future
for us and reeled it down upon us like a curling peel.
Like any fine artist, he
controlled the tension of the audience's longing. You
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desired, unwittingly, a certain kind of roll or climb, or a return
to a certain
portion of the air, and he fulfilled your hope slantingly, like a
poet, or evaded it until
you thought you would burst, and then fulfilled it surprisingly, so
you gasped and
cried out.
The oddest, most
exhilarating and exhausting thing was this: he never quit.
(40)
The music had no periods, no rests or endings; the poetry's
beautiful sentence
never ended; the line had no finish; the sculptured forms piled
overhead, one into
another without surcease. Who could breathe, in a world where rhythm
itself had
no periods?
It had taken me several
minutes to understand what an extraordinary thing I
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was seeing. Rahm kept all that embellished space in mind at once.
For another
twenty minutes I watched the beauty unroll and grow more
fantastic and unlikely before
my eyes. Now Rahm brought the plane down slidingly, and just in
time, for I thought I
would snap from the effort to compass and remember the line's long
intelligence; I
could not add another curve. He brought the plane down
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runway. After a pause, I saw him step out, an ordinary man, and make
his way
back to the terminal.
The show was over. It was
late. just as I turned from the runway, something
caught my eye and made me laugh. It was a swallow, a blue-green
swallow,
having its own air show, apparently inspired by Rahm. The swallow
climbed high over
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the runway, held its wings oddly, tipped them, and rolled down the
air in loops.
The inspired swallow. I always want to paint, too, after I see the
Rembrandts. The
blue-green swallow tumbled precisely, and caught itself and flew up
again as if
excited, and looped down again, the way swallows do, but tensely,
holding its body
carefully still. It was a stunt swallow.
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1 went home and thought about Rahm's performance that night, and the
next
day, and the next.
I had thought I knew my way
around beauty a little bit. I knew I had devoted
a good part of my life to it, memorizing poetry and focusing my
attention on
complexity of rhythm in particular, on force, movement, repetition,
and surprise, in
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both poetry and prose. Now I had stood among dandelions between two
asphalt
runways in Bellingham, Washington, and begun learning about beauty.
Even the
Boston Museum of Fine Arts was never more inspiriting than this
small north-western
airport on this time-killing Sunday afternoon in June. Nothing on
earth is more
gladdening than knowing we must roll up our sleeves and move back
the
(70)
boundaries of the humanly possible once more.
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