August 28, 2007

• Most of the time in our lives is spent in the immediate presence of only a few other people.  Even if you know a long list of people, it is still the case that you are probably only ever around a few of them at the same time.  If I am socializing with only a few other people, it is frequently the case that I count as one-tenth, one-fourth—or even sometimes, when I am with just my best friend—one-half of the people present. 

  But this emphasis on me as an individual only comes from the relativity of my life’s limited storyline.  In a crowd, I feel desperately small, and I seem an unoriginal and unknown replica of all other people to the majority of the pedestrians brusquely brushing past me.  Even the compression felt in a swarming airport is, when measured correctly, an injustice to the actual reality of my smallness.  For that airport crowd is only one of many airport crowds globally; and airport crowds are only one kind of crowd; and all the kinds of crowds now are still not all the crowds from the future and the past. 

  To assemble all of humanity mentally is a process of gradual steps.  First, my family and I step out of our house to sojourn to the gathering.  My neighbors are also leaving from their houses.  We head to the main road, where my city of 50,000 is assembling a caravan of walking.  The main city is amassing quickly, and heading as a great herd outwards.   All of the people in my memories, from places I’ve been to, restaurants, parties, drivers around me on the roads, the people in shop windows, and at city council meetings, and football games, are all heading from their dwellings.  It is too broad a stroke to say the same is happening in every city; I must imagine them one by one.  The flow of people from each is dizzying in sight, and ceaseless in outpour.  All of the armies from wars I have read in history stop suddenly, and answer the beckon to participate in my thought experiment.  The farms in Asia and Europe I have always imagined show families leaving everything behind, to head for the summit.  Each shop owner from your town comes too, and the same over again for every town you have never known.  Every face you have accidentally seen comes as well.  Soon, the scenes of people traveling in my mind must flip between everything I can possibly imagine as a place to leave from; and from there, always, are masses of moving people.  I must not lose a single one of these thoughts, each one must remain with all the others as puzzle pieces to make the greater whole.  For five minutes I will try to imagine more people, more places, and the hordes of those I have already imagined combining to grow to sizes I have never known. 

  Finally, I must try to view them all.  But I cannot compress them into one sight; I may turn around and see the crowd extend as far as my eyes can see in every direction, but I cannot see the edge of the crowd.  In my mind I hover over the people, flying, to try to find the end, but it never comes.  I am so very small.   

  It does not work to say I am a drop in the ocean, or a speck of sand on the beach, because those are merely ways of saying what reality is like. To conceive of the actual position I hold, I must consciously place myself in a picture that contains every single human being that will ever be.  In this picture, what space do I occupy?  I tremble when I consider it.     

  As I climb the mental ladder to reach reality’s summit, to view how I look in the picture of everything, I lose myself in the thought of it all.       

  • 3:36 am
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