Perspectives

In pre-digital times, people used to keep photographs in albums. As I was growing up, the albums were a dreaded part of the routine whenever anyone came home to visit. I remember cringing as Mum unfurled the pages with the most embarrassing, sometimes even downright ugly representations of me as a child. Of course, mixed in with them were quaint similes of innocence, poignant reminders of lost youth and long forgotten friendships and symbols of the rites of passage indicating the inexorable march of time and the inevitable erasure of infantile purity.

Nature can never be completely described, for such a description of Nature would have to duplicate Nature. - Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, (translated by Archie J. Bahm, 1958)

As a youngster I loved maps. I would spend hours poring over the details of faraway places, intrepidly crossing rivers, hacking my way through remote rainforests and visiting vast metropolises in the distant corners of the globe and still be safely home in time for dinner. Of course the map is no substitute for actually being there, clambering up the slippery stones or feeling the dank humidity of the jungle. Nevertheless, maps are wonderfully useful things. But they can also be frustratingly difficult to interpret. A square inch on the map might translate to a full square mile with a myriad confusing and complex features on the ground. Sometimes a larger scale, more detailed map might help. But there are limits. In Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, a character talks of a map that had been made at a scale of “a mile to the mile”. Being so large, the map had never been spread out and the people had reverted to using the country itself as its own map and found it did “nearly as well”.