I went to the American Museum of Natural History, and it was great, a great museum, and I am something of an expert on museums. I liked it because while I was there I was confronted with the holy vastness of the world, as documented by dioramas, and I left the place feeling very small. You could get lost within the Museum’s forty seven halls, let alone the planet they’ve tried to cram into the model ship bottle of a five story building on the Upper West Side. If that’s how I feel inside a model to scale--and consider the scale!--imagine the feeling when confronted with actual size.
When Andrew was a kid, he told me, it never occurred to him that there were parts of the world he would never see--he assumed that, eventually, every single person saw every single part of the world. Learning about the rainforests of Madagascar or the steppes of Mongolia or the towers of Tokyo, then, took on a different character: Those glossy pictures in the DK wonders of the world book weren’t anything special in themselves, just previews of what was to come, an itinerary, so to speak. The moment when he realized that in fact the world was a larger territory that could even under the best of circumstances be covered in one lifetime was devastating, literally world changing.
So how do you deal with the vastness of the world? Setting aside the existence of I think what most people do, and I include myself most of the time, is we spin a fiction that makes it feel manageable. You take your tiny little slice of existence and you call it home. Then you take the rest of the universe, you call it over there. Since you know home pretty well, and you sometimes take vacations over there, you can easily believe that you know more than half the world--all of home and the bits of over there that are welcoming to Midwestern tourists. You may never make it Paris like you intended, but close enough. And that’s all right, I think. The beauty of living a life is that inside your own head you essentially get to be the author of your own young adult fantasy novel, with a protagonist and enemies and a narrator you find clever or grating or both, and it’s your prerogative to shape the universe however you see fit, to do whatever best moves the plot along. This false equivalency between home and over there gets you much closer to living a meaningful life.
But there are, like any good young adult fantasy universe, a few plot holes that, while easy enough to overlook, can drive the precocious sixth grader mad. For example, you don’t know home. I’m here in New York City, and although I would never dispute someone’s claim to “New Yorker,” it’s quite transparent that even on this tiny, 23.6 square mile island, there’s impossibly more going on than anyone could possibly know. And it’s wild to think about it, but the same is true in East Lansing, the same is true in Plymouth-goddamned-Canton. The world is vast, but it’s not empty. Every single mile squared is more full of life than you could even imagine.
So home, that one part of earth where you feel comfortable, where you feel meaningful, is actually impossibly big and complex itself. It gets worse! Over there is even bigger and more complex than home! Because every single other there is somebody else’s home. There’s billions of ‘em, new ones rising up every single day. Think about ants on a driveway, and then look down at Broadway from your 17th story office, and try to come up with a difference. Think about how many driveways there are. This is my best metaphor for human existence. (I was that precocious sixth grader, and I am here to tell you that the story you love so much doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. This is how I derive pleasure after being bullied in fifth grade.)
I’m getting off track, launching into meaninglessness when what I am here to talk about is smallness. Let’s return to the American Museum of Natural History, for that’s what’s prompted all this. The fact that I left the museum feeling small, feeling humbled is actually unexpected. The promise of “natural history” is that it is possible to wrap your head around over there, to study it and understand it the same way you do anatomy: You poke around enough, you put Latin names on things, and all of a sudden you have a taxonomy for existence. (It’s worth noting that natural history, too, takes home for granted--there were no tableaux of important white men designing natural philosophies, for the makers of the museum must have thought they had that part of the world down pat.) But the idea is that you can make over there understandable, reduce it to its scientific principles. You’re supposed to leave the museum understanding over there--feeling very big indeed.* It’s a Saturday afternoon’s means of fulfilling Andrew’s dream.
But that mission is so hopeless (and not just because the particular people on that mission were also pretty racist.) It’s hopeless because every place is someone’s home, and not even they understand it. And once you confront this, once you begin to comprehend the existence if not the nature of this complexity, encounters with over there--even everyday encounters with home!--are humbling. So I left the museum feeling small.
But this smallness is not meaninglessness, as I so wisely avoided claiming a few paragraphs ago. It’s just a different kind of story you find yourself in. It’s not a story in which you’re the protagonist--in fact, it’s probably a story without a protagonist at all. It’s a story of existence, existence which doesn’t have to be but for some reason is, and of one category of existence, life, which similarly doesn’t have to be but is.
Now, I’m not going to bore you by saying that you are going to make some small impact and that every little impact matters. A speck on a speck on a speck, as Neil deGrasse Tyson has called you, does not get to be anything more than a blip. But that’s not the point. What this smallness means is that your adventure never has to end: Even if you spend your whole life confronting this world head on, you will never run out of over there to discover.*You’re probably not actually supposed to feel that way, at least not now that Neil deGrasse Tyson is in charge. But you get the point.
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