Brilliant writers, they brought steely accuracy and lyricism to their writing. Both carried to their prose a broody disposition, capable of being lifted up at times to a kind of gallant stoicism. Like Albert Camus in his Lyrical Essays, they infused their language with an undifferentiated but basically spiritual sadness, drawing the tragic nature of existence along as a drone through everything they wrote.

It didn’t matter whether the manifest subject was split elevators on an EgyptAir flight, or the way silos look against the flat fields of Kansas. They brought to their superb prose an ambient sensibility which I’d characterize as an incessant sensitivity to the enigma of earthly lives.

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Langewische, on the 2001 EgyptAir crash:

A computer captured what [Ann Brennan,the ATC] would have seen—a strangely abstract death no more dramatic than a video game. About two minutes after the final radio call, at 1:49:53 in the morning, the radar swept across EgyptAir’s transponder at 33,000 feet. Afterward, at successive twelve-second intervals, the radar read 31,500, 25,400, and 18,300 feet—a descent rate so great that the air-traffic-control computers interpreted the information as false, and showed “XXXX” for the altitude on Brennan’s display.  With the next sweep the radar lost the transponder entirely, and picked up only an unenhanced “primary” blip, a return from the airplane’s metal mass. The surprise is that the radar continued to receive such returns (which show only location, and not altitude) for nearly another minute and a half, indicating that the dive must have dramatically slowed or stopped, and that the 767 remained airborne, however tenuously, during that interval. A minute and a half is a long time. As the Boeing simulations later showed, it must have been a strange and dreamlike period for the pilots, hurtling through the night with no chance of awakening.

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Strangely abstract, “XXXX,” metal mass, strange and dreamlike period… You can extract, if you want to be analytical about it, moments when the surrealist substructure of this prose pokes out of its essentially technical content, and if you’re UD you’re reminded of Don DeLillo, also on the subject of flight:

At the boarding gate, the last of the static chambers, the stillness is more compact, the waiting narrowed. He will notice hands and eyes, the covers of books, a man with a turban and netted beard. The crew is Japanese, the security Japanese… He hears Tamil, Hindi, and begins curiously to feel a sense of apartness, something in the smell of the place, the amplified voice in the distance. It doesn’t feel like earth. And then aboard, even softer seats. He will feel the systems running power through the aircraft, running light, running air. To the edge of the stratosphere, world hum, the sudden night. Even the night seems engineered, Japanese, his brief sleep calmed by the plane’s massive heartbeat.

In our time, when even the nights are engineered, our best writers will sweep the darkness up, right along with the technology, to which they will give a heartbeat. Langewische could do all of that.