A Really Big World
On the world and its experiences
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Dear Bolu,
How big is the world? Really big, I’m sure, is your answer. And it’s true. The world is big and this we know by head. By experience, however, I don’t think we grasp its scale. We spend most of our lives in and between tiny pockets of familiar cities, and if we’re lucky we occasionally get to make darts to less familiar spots. When Christmas comes, our bonus may afford us a train ride down south to see our grandparents in the village. By summer, we may have enough saved for a road trip across the entire Middle Belt with our college buddies. And should we choose to attend a friend’s wedding in Wyoming in May, we’d have had to purchase our flight tickets eight months ahead to only slightly intensify the strain on our strained finances.
On these voyages, we travel in tubes and pressurized cabins, and if we’re lucky to get good seats, we’re treated to a modest view of new territories. It’s not titillating, of course. We see the forests, settlements, rivers, and lights that constitute these towns as well as the clouds that hover over them, and that is all. We don’t breathe in the air in these places. We don’t taste their food. We don’t watch the sun set in these cities that we drive through and fly over. We don’t go to them, no, we go through them. In a matter of hours, we arrive in a new, shiny pocket on the other side of the atlas and continue living. We may have travelled the full day but in terms of our substantive experience, we’ve simply been lifted from location X and dropped in location Y.
The world is big, yes, but we hardly ever experience its bigness. It’s not our fault, and I don’t know the remedy for it. Is it even a problem? I can’t tell you that for sure. Does the internet help? I wonder. They say the World Wide Web has made the world a smaller place—a global village—and they’re right. We’re all connected. We’ve all seen the white walls of Santorini and the reflection pools of the Taj Mahal without ever stepping foot in those places. That’s good. Thanks to the internet, we’re aware of the beauty of these locations and we can describe them in vivid detail. Thanks to the internet, we can say, “I saw videos of a mountain as flat as a tabletop in South Africa, and I’d like to go there someday”. Again, that’s good.
But could it also be true that because of the internet, we’re less motivated to step out of our studio apartments and experience the bigness of the world? Is it at all possible that the fact that we’ve seen three vlogs and seventeen blog posts narrating a day in Windhoek makes us less interested in the experience of that wonderful city? Counter-intuitive, maybe, but consider the following thought experiment; say Franco has had just one postcard of Venice to look at all his life and Baressi has had as many photos and videos of Venice as one could collect from the internet in an hour to consume, who do you think would be filled with the most awe when they visit the city? Who is likelier to live fuller in the moment? Who would you bet on to be the most excited when they win an all-expense paid trip to that Italian spectacle? Yes, your guess is as good as mine.
Some weeks ago, I saw Léon: The Professional, a movie. It was released in 1994, and it’s still a good watch. I’ve had it on my list for a very long time, and I only just got around to seeing it. Some weeks before Léon, I saw Verdens Verste Menneske (The Worst Person in the World), an equally brilliant Norwegian film released in 2021. Both movies are over 25 years apart, and just as different in tempo, language, and plot. Brilliant, yet entirely different. Along that spectrum of time and style, how many similarly wonderful pieces of cinema could one possibly find? A whole lot, I tell you, and that also speaks to how big the world is. When we say the world is really big, we usually constrain our thoughts to just the planet’s size and the number and diversity of its people. In terms of the sheer volume of experiences available to us, however, the world is much bigger than we could comprehend. There’s a lot to be seen and read and touched and felt and heard and loved in this world, and it often gets daunting. I’d never seen a Norwegian movie before this one, for example, and it made me wonder how many other fabulous international films I’ve missed out on. My guess is I’ve missed out on too many. I also recently found out that Wes Anderson directed two movies this year, and the odds are that I won’t get to see them for a long time. Imagine that. The world is rich and full. It has a lot to give—too much, perhaps. And for us poor souls living in pockets made of concrete and zinc, I wonder how we can make the most of this really big world, dear friend.
Fin.
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- Wolemercy