How strange is this combination of proximity and separation. That ground—seconds away—thousands of miles away.

The line captures the aviator’s paradox: flight collapses physical distance while intensifying emotional and existential distance. From the air, the earth is visually near—“seconds away” in the sense that a descent could reach it quickly—yet it can feel “thousands of miles away” because altitude, speed, and isolation detach the flyer from ordinary human scale and contact. Lindbergh often wrote about the psychological effects of being alone in the cockpit, where the landscape becomes both intimate (clearly seen) and remote (unreachable in lived, social terms). The quote distills modernity’s broader tension: technology brings places within reach while simultaneously estranging us from them.