• http://www.quietbabylon.com/2009/05/29/6-things-that-give-me-a-crushing-sense-of-scale/

These Secret Vespers installments are tagged with scale, though many others could be. That crushing sense is one of the hardest sensations for me to put to words. Like love, hope, and so many other pre-verbal feelings, I find I can set it up with words or art, but that’s all I can do. The rest happens in the viewer or reader.

I get sort of dizzy, sort of light-heading, and I feel sort of outside myself when the scale of something big hits me. The traffic seen from above a major highway does this to me. The ocean, especially when stormy, does this to me. That documentary, Baraka, does this to me.

But enough about me. What has given you a crushing sense of scale?

That day, you were standing with me in the tunnel, rigid and transfixed. The ocean under glass, you told me. A minute later you asked, did I want to see an immortal?

You led me by the hand into the research section, a place that reminded me of university—data posters on the walls, desks with computers and stray bits of equipment. Then into your office, full of the fossils of sea vertibrates hundreds of millions of years old. Some of the species you showed me live now. Some of them are extinct, including your favourties. I don’t remember all their names. I remember the jellyfish, Turritopsis nutricula, tiny and nacreous, never dying, but as you explained, a reincarnation that comes at the cost of its memories.

We could play a game like that, take a drug that prevented the formation of memory, meet each other again and again for the first time. Unlike these jellyfish, we could take notes for our future selves. But I know those movies have been written, and I know all of humanity has come before and left us their notes, history and literature. You added, all of natural history has come before and left us its notes, and you put a fossil back onto your desk.

I remember the poster you backed up against, algae populations against ocean depth, as you drew me to you. Not the lips, you said, opening the neck of your blouse and bringing my head there.

Who would not want a return to childhood, to live again and again, endlessly grow old and revert to innocence? But even the immortal medusae are vulnerable, you said later; even the most wonderful of creatures are sometimes lost.

You must know that I still visit the tunnel under the aquarium.

How do you feel about your first time in love? Is the first high always the highest?

What can last forever, waiting: geometry, the edge of the universe, making shapes out of shapes. Wave forms written over eternity.

What do you think of the idea that some of the objects you see in the night sky ceased to exist long ago? Their light is still streaming out like a ghost.

Have you ever noticed how so much of everything people know, they know from circles and straight lines? Even 1 and 0. Arguably, the constants pi and e and even the root of -1 come from circles and lines.

You know that feeling, when you really “get” a work of art, or the stars in the sky or the clouds just overwhelm you, or a massive number floors you? I think there’s something honest about feeling tiny.