Perspective

I really like to have the window seat on planes. Not on long haul flights, they are very bad for window seats because you get trapped by sleeping people and there's nothing to see out the window anyway. I'm talking about short flights, about an hour or so, when it's daytime and you can look out and watch the world slide past vastly beneath you.

If it's late afternoon or early morning, it's good to get the same side of the plane as the sun. The great attraction is to see the light reflected off a myriad of tiny dams scattered all the way to the horizon. It's especially stunning when the land is otherwise dry and parched. I also like to look at the roads and big highways. The land is mostly empty so they curve their way gracefully around the edges of hills and rivers, curving like the tracings of comets orbiting through the vaccuum.

The best parts, however, are the towns. You can see the traffic crawling along the roads, making imperceptible progress. You can't see people directly but you know they are there by their effects, tiny sub-atomic particles exerting mysterious forces on their surroundings. Cars move, houses just exist, roads roll on and on. It's strange to think of the thousands of people down there going about their commonplace, important and trivial lives. Some will be playing sport, some walking to the shops, most hidden inside watching TV or fighting or making love or cooking.

Every movement, so crucial to them, is invisible to you high up above them. You can survey their lives but not experience it. It's a cruel perspective to take on the world. Individuals have no consequence, there is no movement or progress. If the Eiffel Tower were to spring forth from downtown Goulburn, it would be dwarfed by the arc of the horizon, pulled flat by distance and gravity.

If you flew higher still the towns themselves would vanish. It's only countries now. And eventually they too would melt into the earth, which would in turn be just a speck of light. I don't know why imagining this appeals to me so much, because there's something frightening about it. It's a kind of moral anorexia, imagining everything that I believe to be significant shrunk to nothingness by the distance. It is frightening, but it's comforting too. It gives me perspective on my life by showing me the big picture of other people's lives. The highs and the lows are gone, just the gross facts remain.

The word perspective itself is strange to me. I learned its artistic sense when I was about 8 or 9 in a drawing class. It seemed magical to me. A simple way to capture anything, no matter how huge, on a single piece of paper. You just had to stand far enough back. Later I became aware of its figurative sense. It's to do with point of view, a sense of scale. Perspective can grant you a sense of humour. It can numb the pain. It can help you make sense of the incomprehensible.

But too much perspective blinds you. It takes you away from what is human. It takes you far from home, into a universe that doesn't care about you and your fancies, your dreams. You can get lost in the big picture.

[...]

Not really sure what to make of this. I have a strange feeling, and I'm trying to capture it by writing about it. I think I'm circling around it, delineating its borders fairly sharply, but failing utterly to discover what lies inside. Perhaps geometry is not the best tool for exploring emotions, but I have no other instruments.

Maybe I should have just stuck with the window seat idea. Might as well just hit that Publish button. Sigh.