• 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?

You must know I still visit that tunnel under the aquarium, with its view from under the fish and its deep blue light. Most people come during feeding, they want the agitation, the water filled with bubbles, but I come to be alone, to see the animals swim in quiet circles. This is how we really live, always returning, always waiting. Waiting, like you and I the day we met, rigid, watching the smooth movement of fish, only a meter apart.

In your office you showed me fossils from hundreds of millions of years ago. Some of those species live now. Some of them are extinct, your favorite among them. Nature is like that, you told me, sometimes the most wondrous creatures are lost.

I tried to kiss you and you moved your mouth away. You opened your collar and said, “No, here.” You arced your neck, slid your whole back against the wall, pressed up from your toes.

You told me we all die, even the immortal medusae are vulnerable. You have no idea how often I think about that.

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.