Like his daughter Athena, time stops where he’s concerned. Time-free flight – perhaps one day we will master that too, taking off vertically from Paris, hovering in the heavens for a few hours until New York catches up and we gently descend a spiral staircase of air. I like Logue’s use of light as a simile for silence – elsewhere he refers to the sea being ‘quiet as light’.
Brighter than day His shadow; silent as light
The footprint of His time-free flight
Down the Nile’s length, across the Inland Sea …
Source: Christopher Logue, War Music, London: Faber and Faber, 2001, p. 38