I used to be able to look at all of the mountains and gain something from the experience. Now, I just cower in fear. I can’t understand them, ever. I can’t look out and see all of them or know the centuries that they took to come into being. They are too big. If I look out and try to know them, they only mock me and continue on in either direction. Panorama is too hard.
It isn’t that I can’t see the big picture or extrapolate their meaning. It is just that I can’t fathom them all at once. I forget them almost as soon as I have seen them because they can’t stick to anything in my mind. I’m filled with small things, with trivia. Things like mountains and golden gate bridges and oceans have nothing to hook onto. They aren’t idiosyncratic. They just are. They aren’t mine or yours or anyone else’s and I can’t make them to be. They persist and they will continue to do so without a thought.
The part of me that can look at pictures and make them into representations of real things completely banks when I put something like mountains in front of it. It keeps on trying to take a picture, to put a frame on the whole idea. It tries to box it in and label it as something that I have seen. But, it fails. I come away not knowing anything of what I have seen.
I feel that way about humanity too. It is just too big.
