Onism

You can hear it in the Islamic call to prayer at dawn, in the afternoon school bell, in a train whistle howling in the distance at night. It’s encoded in the flicker of fluorescent lights, in the lyrics of lullabies, in lottery numbers, and in the word archipelago. You can smell it in sunscreen and diesel fumes and old books that fall apart in your hands; taste it in lukewarm champagne and hot blood trickling from a wound on your forehead. It’s packed aboard the Voyager spacecraft, currently fleeing our solar system like a flare fired from the deck of a sinking ship. Sometimes you feel it vibrating in your pocket, even when it’s not there.

It’s a delirious madness built into all living things. Right from the beginning, each of us has to confront a certain fundamental paradox: in order to be anywhere, you have to be somewhere. You have to confine yourself to just one body, inhabiting only one place at a time. This is the only perspective you’ll ever have, the only stretch of history you’ll ever get to see for yourself. Even though you may be lucky enough to serve as a witness to the universe, you’re cursed by the knowledge that you can only scratch the surface of it. You feel like those first explorers, thousands of years ago, who drew their maps right to the edge of the known world and had to make their peace with vast stretches of blank space.

It’s strange how little of the world you actually get to see. No matter where on Earth you happen to be standing, the horizon you see in the distance is only ever about three miles away from you, a bit less than five kilometers. Which means that at any given time, you’re barely more than an hour’s walk from a completely different world. Alas, even if you lace up your boots and take off for the hills, the circle of your horizon will follow you around like a prison searchlight. The gravel under your feet will always look gritty and literal; the mountains in the distance will always seem bluish and otherworldly. Which means your surroundings will always be infused with a certain ambivalence. Maybe this is where you belong—or maybe there’s something far better just over the next ridge. Without calibrating your perspective to the breadth of all possible options, you have no way of knowing. You’ll always have to wonder.

Still, most of the time you manage to keep your focus on the bright circle of your immediate experience, while your brain gets to work building a mental picture of everything you might be missing, doodling away in the blank spaces on the map. It starts by extrapolating outward from the world you know—if you’ve seen one little town, you’ve seen them all—and fills out the remainder with a collage of secondhand accounts and postcard snapshots. You may never make it to Egypt, but you’ve already built the pyramids inside your head. You might’ve only seen a few samurai movies and anime shows, but still assume you have a half-decent understanding of Japanese culture. In this way you build yourself a mental model of what lies beyond your horizon. It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough to fill in the blanks. Sometimes all you need is a single word on a map—Tuanaki, Saxenburgh, Antillia—and your mind fills up with visions of what might be out there.

But sometimes late at night you look out at the lights flickering in the distance, just on the edge of the horizon, and find yourself struggling to imagine the alternate universe that each of them represents. You think of all the places you’ll never have time to explore, some of which might feel like the home you never had, or like a living hell, or like walking around on another planet. You might one day be able to visit one or two or ten of these places, but you’ll never be able to shake the feeling that with every step you take, a thousand more lights will appear, and a thousand more, and a thousand more. It’s as if you’re standing in front of the departures screen in an airport, flickering over with so many exotic place names, each representing one more path you could explore or one more thing you’ll never get to see before you die—and all because, as the arrow on the map helpfully points out, you are here.

It’s strange to think that some of those lights in the distance might be looking right back at you, just barely able to make out the lamp shining over your back door from three miles away. There might even be a few people peering down from a plane passing overhead, wondering to themselves what it’s like to be standing right where you’re standing, and they might even be feeling a sense of loss, knowing they’ll never have time to explore your corner of the world. But then they’ll banish the thought; they can already picture it clearly in their heads.

We all know that there’s no such thing as a tropical paradise, or hell on Earth. That faraway people are neither angelic monks nor snarling grotesques, that their lives are just as messy and troubled and mundane as our own. But like the first explorers, we can’t help ourselves from sketching monsters in the blank spaces on the map. Perhaps we find their presence comforting. They guard the edges of the abyss, and force us to look away, so we can live comfortably in the known world, at least for a little while.

But if someone were to ask you on your deathbed what it was like to live here on Earth, perhaps the only honest answer would be: “I don’t know. I passed through it once, but I’ve never really been there.”