I can’t remember the first time I looked at a world map, but I have a clear memory of the first time I felt awed by an epic landscape.
That’s dangerous, I think.
What it means is that we’ve become instinctively programmed to think of the world in terms that we can define and contain within our mental grasp. It means we have to artificially learn, against our now-instinctive practices of cartographic definition and demarcation, that the world we’re used to delimiting is actually so much greater than us that it’s effectively boundless. We’re forced to learn artificially what was painfully obvious to anyone born before conceptual cartography fell out of fashion.
Perhaps it’s my nostalgic tendencies, but that seems a tragic departure from something primal and profoundly human.
This thought occurred to me while I was working at the Dictionary of Old English, reading a passage about the Israelites wandering in the wilderness of Sinai. As a child, it always seemed silly to me—knowing as I did in my cartographical mind how “diminutive” Sinai is—that people should get lost in such a tiny little wedge of desert for forty years. And yet, to actually be there, you could believe how that mythologized event seems plausible.
More narratives come to mind. We might think, “Why are Odysseus’ wanderings so dramatic? Aren’t they just a hop around the Greek Peninsula, from Troy to Ithaca?”
(After all, that’s only just a finger’s breadth on the map.)
But if you were to pilot a skiff around the unstable Mediterranean, you’d know that it could be an immense journey and anything but certain, predictable, or defined in its outcome.
I suppose I’m just a little saddened that most of our training teaches us to mentally limit and define that which exceeds us.
Fortunately, the world seems to draw us back to knowledge of our own insignificance once we really experience it. You know how exceedingly epic the world is when you’re under a mountain or looking down on a glacier or making your way through the boreal forest.
I’m pretty grateful for that fact.
