When the weight of the world fades away - Joseph Vogl's exploration of the floating. It all began with a gaze into the sky. 'Meteor' in ancient Greek refers to a broad range of floating objects, including atmospheric phenomena like clouds and weather, as well as the paths and movements of celestial bodies. However, the unstable and fleeting is not only encountered in meteorology. In his brilliant essay, Joseph Vogl explores various settings - from literature to philosophy to natural science - of the floating, ephemeral, and (again) lightness, where the weight of the world diminishes and new realms of possibility are opened up. The floating poses a challenge to our perception processes because it resides in the "not yet and no longer," thus eluding conventional forms of knowledge, conceptualizations, and ideas of order. Through prominent texts - from Kafka and Musil, Goethe and Galileo, to Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges - Joseph Vogl, one of the most extraordinary philologists of our time, investigates the relationships between heaviness and lightness, where our processes of understanding intersect with power structures and the conditions of the world with states of the soul. In light of a present increasingly besieged by the gravitational forces of economic, ideological, and military powers, Vogl's text, emerging from his highly regarded farewell lecture in Berlin, is a tribute to lightness and the moments of fluidity, in which the freshness of a beginning can break forth from seemingly petrified world situations. "The most intelligent person I have ever met." Roger Willemsen. The heavy and the light - Joseph Vogl on fleeting phenomena. From petrified world situations to a program of lightness - Joseph Vogl's essay on the floating. An approach to the 'in-between' in Kafka and Musil, Goethe and Galileo, Calvino and Borges.