For the man who invented elevators

Human beings perform exact silence when riding up floors of air in an elevator. Silence rolls up their eyes until the last crescent of vision perches forward; and usually their ears are flexed like that of a pointing dog. And so it is with people and space: unrelenting, whimsical banter. Like wind which is shut between a narrow shaft -- moaning over the difference between solid earth and destiny -- the wind is acrophobic. Simply, an elevator is a geometric shape trained to prove physics; careening on a concrete point perpendicular to the imagination, till finally, verging with gravity, it pulls sound into a pause. An elevator is an angular, unattached globe playing monkey business with a stratum of dignity. Why else would chimpanzees be the first subjects of space? Monkeys reached bald spots in the sky so buildings would relinquish their arrogance. Later it was a selected team of bandits, men who outlawed the mundane expressions of air, dedicating themselves week after week to Sir Isaac Newton, outwitting their own physiology so they could fly. But finally, a sympathetic inventor named Elisha Otis, who understood the common need for altitude and the odds, made a slow motion rocket for every human to practice speed.