Since Childhood, my first one, I always imagined it was somehow possible. I always imagined I could do it, and the exploits of David Copperfield pretty much exactly failed to cure me of this delusion. For better and worse, I never tried, stuck with the disappointing cognition that people can simply not do this. More recently, however, I read what a wholly remarkable book has to say on the subject:
There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. . . . One problem is that you have to miss the ground accidentally. It's no good deliberately intending to miss the ground because you won't. You have to have your attention suddenly distracted by something else when you're halfway there, so that you are no longer thinking about falling, or about the ground, or about how much it's going to hurt if you fail to miss it. . . .
Last night, about the time I decided to abandon consciousness, I threw my head at my bed, or the pillow, as it were, got distracted, and missed. I didn't get to go very far, being indoors and all, but I made some important realizations about Life, The Universe, and Everything. Or, perhaps just myself. I realized why it is such a dangerous and attractive thing to read fiction. Or, perhaps just for myself. I am tradgicly, I dare confess to a bored world, bored. I want to believe there is more to this life than the daily routines we call life. I know there is, I just haven't been doing it. It is a kind of bored that strikes a man to enjoy fiction and secretly wish he was living some other kind of life where things happened, despite the main character's private wish that his life would be a little more boring. I particularly would rather be doing the kind of flying described in book four. Alas, in this life I have yet to do either.
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