Infinite Room.

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Good chance I'm repeating this theme, gentle reader, apologies in advance. There's a phenomenon I've experienced that puzzles and delights me. Given mild temps and calm winds, as the light fades, just at the far end of magic hour, I've had the occasion to perceive my out-of-doors as suddenly being inside. That the infinite is bounded. That all the world's a giant room.

This may be aided (and first happened after) by a past career inside some of the largest rooms in the world. When you get blasé about a mostly open floor that's larger than a city block, when one begins to lament 48' ceilings in the new building as being such a pain compared to the 54 footers in the old building, well, I'd like to suggest that one's definition of “room” may be skewing.

I'll note that still winter sunsets won't permit me this fun shift, nor does direct sun, and breezes break the illusion. But like tonight, the first serial-spring-day, the sun is sliding down in a sky so calm that even the Corialis Effect is taking a rest, and I eagerly anticipate my room suddenly blowing out.

The Apollo astronauts had the unique view of seeing the earth from just far enough that the atmosphere was visible as the thickness of a fingernail. As many other astronauts have remarked, all of human experience has taken place within this thin shell, but only Apollo afforded a far enough vantage to equate a bodily unit of measure. (From the ISS and shuttle flights, the atmosphere was a Stoney's throw below.)

My thoroughly terrestrial version makes me think of all the trash we toss around our “room.” Who would light a charcoal grill inside? (Besides the Greeks at Delphi.) Littering gets damned personal inside your house.

It also fascinates me that there are places on earth that have such a narrow temperature range that one could encounter this room-feeling in any season. Typically at low latitudes and high altitudes, such a climate boggles my mind, here, where we seasonally swing over 120 degrees (F) thru a year. I'd love to visit them though, Cuernavaca is on my list.

But. Back to my room. It has birds in it, cats, dogs, squirrels, neighbors...I could go off into Yellow Submarine lyrics about the entirety that is encompassed by this all. And it's lovely to consider, to explore what would happen if we could bottle this and share it. To make my version of The Total Perspective Vortex not as a disciplinary tool, but to give everyone a glimpse that it's effectively a closed system, and we've been treating it like an open sink.

I implore you to try thinking about it for a bit. Try to contemplate the edges of your room or house simply being a prop or set inside a much larger sound studio. That all you'll ever know is bounded and constrained to a boundary layer thinner than paper, on a ball so tiny that its entirely likely no one's found us yet. We're all yelling “Who?” as loudly as we can, but Horton's nowhere nearby.

Photo Source.