German novelist W.G. Sebald liked to salt his fiction with photographs. They illustrated his scenes so well that I had to wonder whether he staged the photos to match his text or shaped his story to match photos he happened to have.
In one of his books, Austerlitz, the title character goes flying at night with pilot friend Gerald Fitzpatrick in a “Cessna.” He describes the mesmerizing sight of the familiar constellations overhead. Now, looking up at the stars from an airplane is an entrancing experience, but no one ever had it in a Cessna.
