Map/territory
When I was a child, I had educational place mats: the solar system, the periodic table (my mother was a chemist, after all), and maps of the USA and the world. Looking at these maps, I used to plan trips. When I started taking swimming lessons, it occurred to me that I could swim down the waterways and across the lakes: I planned to ride down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico and from there skirt the coast down to South America. I knew that people swam across the English Channel—surely this was about the same? My mother found this too sweet to disabuse, but I soon realized that the world is much bigger than it looked on my place mat.
I should have known: by that time I had already flown across the Atlantic several times. But the sweet closeness of the map, its human scale, allured me: it is much easier to imagine the world on the scale of the map than on its proper scale. When they say “1 cm:10 km”, who actually sees the kilometers? I still only see centimeters on the paper. I suppose that, were I a great scholar or theoretician, I would make some point about how our representation of space as smaller than it is is a symptom of our inability to imagine it at full scale. Borges would say something about a map so large it covered and subsumed the territory it (re)presented, but I don’t have nearly his power of creative immagination.
Really, it’s much simpler: today I was looking at a map, planning the next step in my trip, and I had this poignant memory. Traveling, I learned that I haven’t really grown up much. I’m still looking at a map and planning where I’ll head next, thinking “I could jump here, or walk there”. Never mind that I jump by an airplane or walk by a train. I am the same person I always was, and I’ve learned so much. I can’t swim there, but why can’t I go there by some other means? It’s not quite as straight forward as I thought it was, but I know enough now to make it happen: as a child, I stared at the map and imagined what it would be like to go there; now, a little more grown up, I check the map to show me how to get where I’m going.
