I WOKE up over Greenland, an astonishing experience. I was on a long-haul flight from Heathrow, destined for the oppressive heat of Dallas, and had been dozing intermittently. But, waking from one of these dozes, I glanced out of the window and saw, spread out below me with almost supernatural detail and clarity, snowy mountains, with valleys green beneath the snowline, and a series of bays and inlets, where the sea reached inland between mountains. I could see floating ice in these narrow inlets — fjords, perhaps.

The whole view was an intricate pattern of white and green and blue; it was breath-takingly beautiful, stretching miles and miles, with no roads or any sign of human habitation — a true wilderness. I found it heartening to know, and to see for myself, that there were still such true wildernesses, extensive, untouched, pristine.

At such times, I often imagine some character from the past sharing the view with me, even more astonished than I am, and I imagine what they are thinking. So, sometimes, I imagine Coleridge looking over my shoulder, as I fire up the internet, or Edmund Spenser in my passenger seat, at once amazed and terrified by the traffic.

On this occasion, I was idly wondering what Dr Johnson would make of my transatlantic flight, with its aerial view of Greenland, when I suddenly remembered that the great man had himself anticipated just such a thing; so he might not be so surprised after all. There is a passage in his book Rasselas (a philosophical novella that is actually much wiser than Voltaire’s Candide, with which it is often compared, for they were both published in 1759), in which Johnson gives these words to an inventor: “‘Sir,’ said he, ‘you have seen but a small part of what the mechanic sciences can perform. I have been long of opinion that, instead of the tardy conveyance of ships and chariots, man might use the swifter migration of wings, that the fields of air are open to knowledge, and that only ignorance and idleness need crawl upon the ground.’”

So, Johnson was alive to the marvels and beauties, the new knowledge that might arise from air travel; but, as the dialogue develops, we see that he also predicted the shadow side of that technology: “‘If men were all virtuous,’ returned the artist, ‘I should with great alacrity teach them to fly. But what would be the security of the good if the bad could at pleasure invade them from the sky? Against an army sailing through the clouds neither walls, mountains, nor seas could afford security. A flight of northern savages might hover in the wind and light with irresistible violence upon the capital of a fruitful reason.”

A I recalled that passage, my mind and my heart turned in prayer to those in Ukraine and Gaza who might, at this moment, be looking up at the sky, fearful of that “irresistible violence” from on high, which Johnson had so wisely and sadly foreseen.