Aloft, incumbent on the dusky air

Forthwith up to the clouds

With him I flew, and underneath beheld
The earth outstretched immense, a prospect wide
And various: wond'ring at my flight and change
To this high exaltation.

- PL 5.86-90

I'm posting this entry in the middle of a transcontinental flight, thanks to a free trial run of on-board WiFi. Looking out the window gives me access to a sight that Milton could only have imagined, that Eve could only experience as a sinful dream of prophetic wish-fulfillment.

This--the idea that technology enables what previous generations could only imagine--is banal stuff, but it reminds me of an idea that's been implanted in my head for a while. Implanted in my head since I heard two talks: the first about science fiction and globalization, the second about mapping in the early modern world. For me, what united these two talks was a question of tropes and metaphors in their relation to technology. Science fiction, according to the first talk, does something new with poetic language by providing a new way to literalize tropes. I asked this speaker what, precisely, the difference is between an Elizabethan poet describing his lover's cheek as roses and a science fiction writer describing a beautiful cyborg constructed with actual rose petals in its face. I realized later that the answer has something to do with belief and time: the Elizabethan poet never expects the reader to believe roses can actually be in cheeks; the reader of science fiction can believe that in the future it might be possible to construct a rosy-cheeked cyborg. As I listened to the second talk, weeks later, I realized that this kind of shift helps us to account for the Renaissance trope of mapping--a trope that oscillates rapidly between fiction, present fact, and future possibility.

I wonder if technology is the missing component of, say, de Man's famous discussion of allegory versus symbol.