The Translator

It's always a surprise and a wonderment when our plane breaks through a ceiling of cloud and, as though shedding some huge entangling dress of tattered lace, comes out naked into the naked blue sky and the sun. We on earth think there are blue skies and gray skies, but in fact of course the sky is always clear.

Then the reverse too. Christa Malone's plane descended out of the clear desert air and was clothed again in clammy batting; came down through the ceiling into the house. There a light rain was falling: steely ocean, colorless heaped-up city, air of tears. Remembering what earth is like. Auden once said that it shocked him that airplane passengers, able to look down like gods on clouds and the earth, so often paid it no attention: pulled down the blind, read a thriller.
--John Crowley, The Translator