GOING FULL . . . SPHERE

OCTOBER 17, 2021 – For many people, Covid has confined our travel space. For example, over two years have now passed since I took a plane flight. Not since my pre-teen years have I gone so long not going far, at least by air. This relative confinement has sharpened my awareness of a grand paradox of human perception: The nighttime sky reminds me that if I ventured far enough into space, our home, our planet would appear no bigger than a pinprick of light—reflected light, at that; if I traveled farther yet, our blue-green planet wouldn’t even register as a point of faint illumination. Yet, earth itself is so vast a place, none of us will ever walk on more than a minuscule fraction of it.

I was reminded of this yesterday evening when my wife and I watched Sydney Pollack’s film, Out of Africa, starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford.  Much of it was filmed in the Rift Valley and the Chyulu Hills in southeastern Kenya. As the story unfolds, the viewer is treated to sensational scenery from the air, as Redford (Denys Hatton) pilots his Gypsy Moth over safari country and the surrounding wilds of East Africa.

My wife wants to travel there next year—and to France and Switzerland. As I consult an atlas, my finger drifts to adjacent venues, then places adjacent to those until I’m far afield and off the beaten track. I imagine all the corners of land and sea I’d want to see, yet not have the time if given a life of 10,000 years.

Forty years ago this month, I traveled overland the length of Asia—and back again—simply to grasp the size of earth’s largest continent. The trip each way took seven days through as many time zones and deep into conversation with dozens of strangers as curious about me as I was about them. When a full moon rose above the mountains south of Baikal and raced our train eastward, I felt “oneness” with earth—that was the same moon I’d seen in a thousand places remote from the one I called home.

This feeling of “oneness,” however, was short-lived. It underscored another paradox of living on earth, a sphere, which, given the laws of physics, is the only shape on which we can hold our ground, so to speak. This “paradox of the sphere” prevents a person from ever seeing beyond the immediate horizon—without traveling to that immediate horizon, which produces yet another immediate horizon. Thus, a person never sees the whole without separating from it, in which case, the person is no longer “one with the earth.” Where this paradox leads, as I discovered on my round-the-world journey, is right back to the place of beginning. In traveling to as far away from home as I could possibly go (in my case, Rottnest Island off the coast of Perth, Western Australia), my route eventually led me right back . . . home.

And there to greet me was the same ol’ moon.

(Remember to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.)

© 2021 by Eric Nilsson