Thin lives

Today, I took advantage of the lengthening days and ran up to Brooklyn, down through Happy Valley, and out to the south coast in Owhiro Bay. A few stereotypical white clouds dotted the sky to the south, and the sinking sun was turning the headlands to the west into dark silhouettes and the rocky coastal outcrops to the east into brightly-lit montages. The white-capped mountains of the South Island were barely visible to the west; a view straight south fell entirely off the horizon, and beyond that, Antarctica.

I ran east along the coast, past hard black volcanic rocks and weatherbeaten houses with rust streaking from every nail, to Island Bay and then back to human things. Berhampore, Newtown, Aro Valley.

Last night we were up in Wadestown, to the hilly north, at a going-away party for a French friend. At a lull in the party, I walked out the front door and ran out of words. The house looked straight out across Wellington Harbour, and it was a dark night. The docks below us cast some lights onto the water. To the north there were the bright lights of industrial Petone. Across the harbour I could see two lines of light - one running completely horizontal on the road out to Eastbourne, and the Wainuiomata grade slanting up into the hills. A few stars were visible above. Every other part of the vista was completely black.

Wellington Harbour, although deep, is wide with a narrow mouth. That, combined with the heavy winds that sweep down through it, keeps chop and waves to a minimum. (On the ferry back from Picton I could actually see the wind cutting the tops off of the waves left in the boat's wake.) So at night, there's very little to distinguish it from the sky above.

Sky above me, sea below, and very little to distinguish the two. Humans were present only in a narrow band of light. I thought about it.

The universe is an incomprehensibly enormous place, and no human has ever been more than 240,000 miles away from the earth. On a galactic scale, that's a rounding error. The part of the earth's atmosphere that is suitable for human life extends barely ten miles above the earth's surface. With short exceptions, we can't live outside that infinitesimally tiny bubble.

Our normal human activities don't go any deeper than the deepest mineshaft (a bit over two miles) or any higher than the average commercial flight (roughly 6 miles). In actual fact, most human life takes place within a thin terrestrial crust that's perhaps 50 feet thick. We don't even cover the whole planet, 70 percent of which is covered with water, and which has one whole continent that is permanently covered in ice. By any reasonable scale, our crust is unimaginably tiny - or perhaps, thin enough to be conceivable by us.

I don't think that there's a system of thought that is truly capable of coming to terms with this extraordinary fact. Our modes of thinking are definitively crustismic.