Short Life in a Strange World: Birth to Death in 42 Panels. Toby Ferris

Short Life in a Strange World: Birth to Death in 42 Panels

Short Life in a Strange World: Birth to Death in 42 Panels - Toby Ferris

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• The Beggars Musée du Louvre Austria Vienna • Children’s Games Kunsthistorisches • Christ Carrying the Cross Museum • The Fight Between Carnival and Lent • The Conversion of Saul • The Dark Day • Hunters in the Snow • The Peasant and the Birdnester • The Village Kermis • The Wedding Banquet • The Return of the Herd • The Suicide of Saul • The Tower of Babel Czech Republic Prague • The Hay Harvest Roudnice Lobkowicz Collection Hungary Budapest • The Preaching of St John the Baptist Szépmüvészeti Múzeum Italy Naples • The Blind Leading the Blind Museo di Capodimonte • The Misanthrope Rome • View of the Bay of Naples Galleria Doria Pamphilj Spain Madrid • The Triumph of Death Museo Nacional del Prado • The Wine of St Martin’s Day Germany Berlin • Netherlandish Proverbs Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, • Two Monkeys Gemäldegalerie Darmstadt • The Magpie on the Gallows Hessisches Landesmuseum Munich • Head of an Old Woman Alte Pinakothek • The Land of Cockaigne Bamberg • The Drunkard Pushed into the Pigsty (copy, Pieter Brueghel the Younger, after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, private collection) Historisches Museum USA Detroit • The Wedding Dance Detroit Institute of Arts New York • The Harvesters Metropolitan Museum of Art • Three Soldiers Frick Collection San Diego • Landscape with the Parable of the Sower Timken Museum of Art Image Missing

       I Flight

      ‘… the boy a frolic courage caught To fly at random …’

      Arthur Golding, translating Ovid

      I once saw a young man fall from the sky.

      I barely knew him. Dan was perhaps twenty, on leave from the army. My girlfriend’s sister, Zabdi, worked as a para​gliding instructor on the Isle of Arran, and Dan was a friend of her boyfriend, Chris. And so there we were on a September morning in the late 1990s, Dan and Chris and my girlfriend Anna and Zabdi and I, on the slopes of a green hill on the Isle of Arran, paragliding.

      When we picked him up in the minibus, Dan, already a qualified and experienced paraglider, was watching a video of stunt paragliders performing wild manoeuvres, swinging energetically beneath their canopies in figures of eight, looping the loop, skirting crags, skimming lakes, and Dan was clearly inspired. Later, on the mountain, as I was harnessed up and ready to bumble into the air, Zabdi put her hand on my chest and told me to wait: Dan had taken off higher up and was coming overhead. We watched him glide over us for a few seconds, and then, at an altitude of a couple of hundred feet, he started to swing beneath his canopy much as we had seen them do on the video, back and forth, like a pendulum, higher and higher, six, eight swings sweeping out an ever-lengthening arc, just enough time for Zabdi to mutter something under her breath (for fuck’s sake, Dan). Sure enough, he got up too far above his canopy and dropped into it, and in the skip of a heartbeat was tumbling uncontrollably earthward. We watched him fall, lost in his billowing parachute silks, then part emerging, arms thrown out, wheeling, tumbling, and then, thud, into the hillside. As I recall it, the hillside shook, but perhaps it didn’t; perhaps it was just an interior thud I felt. I remember Zabdi screaming ‘Dan’ and belting down the hillside towards where he lay, invisible in the deep gorse. I unharnessed myself and ran after her. There he was, stretched out on his back, laughing uncontrollably. His canopy, we reasoned later, must have caught a little air just as he landed and broken his fall. And then there was that cushion of gorse. Lucky boy.

      The helicopter, a red-and-grey Sea King, had to lollop over from the mainland, nevertheless, and airlift him to Glasgow. He was in traction for six weeks, broken bones and compressed vertebrae. He hated the army,

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