“The world just keeps getting bigger once you get out on your own,” Tom Waits crooned through my morning routine. And I could not agree with him more. I’ve never embraced the popular mantra about the world being small… or the one about life being short. I am in the early thick of life, and already it feels long. I have come to the top of the world, after winding my way through it, and though I can see how people might say that the world shrinks gradually away, its just not true for me.
Not yet at least, and hopefully never. Because age and location have nothing to do with it. From what I can tell, the human experience is startling identical no matter where you go. It has to do with something else. Maybe its perception: one’s capacity to perceive. Or maybe its language: the meaning one ascribes to certain words. I’m not sure, but even as I type, the world is getting bigger, and so I’ll leave it at this. The first stanza of Charles Simic’s, The Something:
Here come my night thoughts
On crutches,
Returning from studying the heavens.
What they thought about
Stayed the same,
Stayed immense and incomprehensible.
(read the whole thing here.)
