«With disappearance will always come the hope of reappearance. At the same school was the son of John Stonehouse, the British Labour Member of Parliament who left a pile of his clothes on Miami beach in 1974 to stage his own suicide. A minute’s silence was held in the Commons and his obituary was published. Australian detectives, acting on a tip-off that Lord Lucan had at last surfaced in Melbourne, inadvertently came across Stonehouse living under an assumed name. He had reappeared. […]
Icarus, blinded by the elation of his ascent, failed and fell: fell to fail. His was a journey up that came down. […] But for Bas Jan Ader to fall was to make a work of art. Whatever we believe or whatever we imagine, on a deep deep level, not to have fallen would have meant failure.»
