Kevin Jackson
Rise to the Occasion
Levitation: The Science, Myth and Magic of Suspension
By Peter Adey
Reaktion Books 293pp £20 order from our bookshop
Sir William Empson, who was steeped in Buddhist learning, liked to tell the story of how Buddha once became annoyed with a congregation to whom he was trying to preach a sermon. Carried away by his eloquence, Buddha had unwittingly floated up into the air; instead of paying attention to his messages of enlightenment and detachment, his audience goggled at and gossiped about his marvellous act of levitation. There are various morals to be drawn from this story, the most obvious religious one being that too keen an interest in signs and wonders is likely to be an obstacle to spiritual development.
Buddha’s vertical takeoff does not appear in Peter Adey’s Levitation, but scores of other elevations do. Adey’s book is exhilaratingly wide-ranging and it is crammed with the sorts of beguiling oddities that would have made Buddha tut in disapproval. It begins, more or less, with Christian ideas of the Assumption and the various saints of the early Church whose holiness launched them towards the heavens, or indeed towards Heaven. It concludes, more or less, with the central European idea of the Luftmensch (the ‘air man’ – impractical and dreamy and unproductive) as manifested both in anti-Semitic propaganda and, more humanely, in the paintings of Marc Chagall and the short stories of Kafka. Adey, perhaps pushing his case a trifle too far, includes in his chapter on Luftmenschen the famous series of photographs of celebrities captured mid-jump by Philippe Halsman (one of the finest images in this book is Halsman’s 1958 ‘aerial’ portrait of the great physicist Robert Oppenheimer).
In the journey from saints and shamans to photographers and film-makers, Adey surveys such matters as the early craze for weight-watching, the pioneers of balloon flight, 19th-century stage magicians, Madame Blavatsky’s advice for would-be defiers
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'The trouble seems to be that we are not asked to read this author, reading being a thing of the past. We are asked to decode him.'
From the archive, Derek Mahon peruses the early short fiction of Thomas Pynchon.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/rock-n-roll-is-here-to-stay
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553