Flight

Whenever I drive across long distances, what always strikes me is the unchanging flatness of the land, the refusal of each bend, each twist in the road to offer up anything other than what has come before - so that the road, stretching ahead, compresses to a single horizontal line, making all distance, near and far, seem the same. And perhaps this contributes to my feeling of precariousness while driving, which stems from my amazement that the surface of something so large (Earth) can hold itself in such a delicate, even state. I think: it must be covering something. The smooth paved road that I hurtle across, the houses erected on common soil, all of this rests on a delicate film that will, at any instant, reveal itself to the chaos beneath. For how else to deal with the scale, how else to understand the unbelievable ratio of size between ourselves and the ground beneath our feet? How we deal with it is simply that we don't. We mark our square space of land, and think of the "Earth" as the 1m² space where we are standing, or sitting, at any given moment. It is only while traveling, while covering a vast distance that we realize how insignificant that distance really is, and see ourselves.

It's said that, were the planet a basketball, the livable ecolayer would be thinner than a coat of varnish on the ball's surface. This is excellent fodder for environmentalists, who can thus point to the fragility of our lives and the systems they rely on. But my concern here is not geological; it is philosophical. For that ecolayer presumably includes the kilometres of breathable air above ourselves, and the fertile soil below. How thick is the space that we actually take up, the space through which we move and thus understand the world? Would it be fair to say a few metres, for most of the inhabitants of this planet? Add a few more for residents in cities. I'm sure the situation would appear different for people who live on slopes, hilly regions with their unique challenges for architecture and transportation. But here in southern Ontario, it is far easier to see that three-dimensionality is an abstract wish, at most a helpful delusion. How flat must something become before it moves from three dimensions to two? If you stretched out the surface of the world, the ratio of the vertical space we use daily to the length of space available to us (pardon my math) would be about 1:4,000,000. Or, it would be about a millimeter high on a plot of land 4 km wide. I don't think the human brain is capable of imagining that degree of flatness. And if we can't imagine it, doesn't that surface in practice lose its third dimension?

There is a common illustration, used (I think) mostly in philosophy and science fiction, of a three-dimensional person who comes across a two-dimensional person, and lifts that person out of the sheet of paper (or whatever) he or she was just in. What happens next? Can the two-dimensional person understand what has happened, or does the idea of a third dimension not even exist in the mind, and is therefore incomprehensible?

Perhaps that is why airports are constructed the way they are, huge, unwieldy structures with unreachable ceilings and populated with shops that seem like they might be brand names in an alternate universe. You first have to leave your city behind, to arrive at this structure, a massive, beached whale lying improbably on a flat, empty expanse of land. It is all so impersonal, and somehow the hangar-like quality of the terminals and the exorbitant food prices and the tunnels that stretch endlessly to nowhere all conspire to remove you from your reality, from the world you know, in preparation for the flight ahead. And then you rise. And as you accelerate upward in a spiral, your ears popping as if to say no, this is not what you were meant to do, and you look out your window and try to reconcile yourself to the idea that you were down there, there, only a few hours ago, it is as if some hand has reached into your two-dimensional universe and lifted you out into the third. You move against the Earth, skimming across its layer of white skin, as your once brothers and sisters move slowly, fractionally, below.