Terra Infinitum
I was flying to Europe when I noticed something strange and seemingly inconsequential.
The seatback in front of me had an interactive screen set to “flight tracker” mode, aka the “watch a tiny icon of your airplane fly across a globe, Indiana Jones style” view.
One of these kind of things:
Except I wasn’t flying from Hawaii to San Francisco (this is just a photo I found on the internet), I was flying from Portland to Amsterdam.
There were a few things I learned by watching the map as I Indiana-Jonesed my way across it:
- Holy smokes, Greenland is HUGE
2. Iceland is the first country that feels like “we’re finally on the other side of the Atlantic”
3. And we were about to fly over some islands I’d never noticed before
They had interesting names, like Tórshavn and Klaksvik and Sandavágur. Which country did they belong to, though?
They were closest to Scotland, but the names definitely didn’t sound Scottish. The next-closest country was Iceland, but that was a bit of a stretch, distance-wise.
What was going on here? Was this an entire country I’d never heard of?
It turns out it sort of was!
It’s an archipelago called the Faroe Islands which, according to Wikipedia, are an “autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark.”
A quick Google Image Search revealed that the island landscapes are simply bonkers:
… and…
… I mean…
… they’re like an Escher drawing come to life.
So who on earth lives there? And what do they do?
By heritage, Faroe Islanders are a mix of Norse Vikings and Scotch-Irish seafarers who have lived a highly isolated existence dating back well over a thousand years.
They have their own language, their own government, and of course their own traditions. They operate independently from Denmark with all their local affairs. Their primary industries are fishing and sheep-herding.
Searching YouTube turned up a multi-part documentary delving further into their lives.
Here’s one such shepherd, Johannes Paterson:
He lives in this farmhouse, built over 1,000 years ago:
He is the 17th(!) generation of Patersons to live and work inside it.
Here’s his wife, Guórió (prounounced Goori), pot-boiling some whale blubber for their family:
The Faroe Islands have a controversial relationship with whales, for two primary reasons.
One, they harvest pilot whales in a yearly event called a Grind (rhymes with “thinned”) that has caught scorn from the international community for perpetuating a tradition that slaughters a threatened species.
Two, that same international community has polluted the surrounding oceans to such an extent that the mercury levels in the whale meat are effectively poisonous. The local government has strongly recommended that pregnant women and children avoid eating it entirely.
Guórió is pregnant with their third child, but eats whale blubber anyway, because that was what she was raised on and that is what she knows.
And so, through a few moments of curiosity, I suddenly found myself aware of a mercury molecule inside the blood of a baby, inside a woman inside a house built before the printing press was invented, inside an island inside an independent nation I had never heard of but was flying over, and all of this because I noticed some odd letters on the screen in front of me.
How many wonders do we fly over every day? How many worlds within worlds does our universe contain, so long as we take the time to see them?
Reality is such a trip. Zoom in as high or low as you like, and there is always something fascinating to marvel at. It’s like Charles & Ray Eames’ profound and moving Powers of 10…
… or exploring the Mandelbrot Set…
… except for everything.
Infinite terrain. Infinite opportunities, so long as we control our awareness, so long as we work to develop it like a muscle.
It is, in many ways, the most human thing we can do.
This superpower we all have was so well captured in this passage by Kurt Vonnegut [gently edited for ease of reading]:
At ten o’clock, the old writer announced it was his bedtime. There was one last thing he wanted to say to us, to his family. Like a magician seeking a volunteer from the audience, he asked someone to stand beside him and do what he said. I held up my hand. “Me, please, me,” I said.
The crowd fell quiet as I took my place to his right.
“The Universe has expanded so enormously,” he said, “that light is no longer fast enough to make any trips worth taking in even the most unreasonable lengths of time. Once the fastest thing possible, they say, light now belongs in the graveyard of history, like the Pony Express.
“I now ask this human being brave enough to stand next to me to pick two twinkling points of obsolete light in the sky above us. It doesn’t matter what they are, except that they must twinkle. If they don’t twinkle, they are either planets or satellites. Tonight we are not interested in planets or satellites.”
I picked two points of light maybe ten feet apart. One was Polaris. I have no idea what the other one was.
“Do they twinkle?” he said.
“Yes they do,” I said.
“Promise?” he said.
“Cross my heart,” I said.
“Excellent!” he said. “Now then: Whatever heavenly bodies those two glints represent, it is certain that the Universe has become so rarefied that for light to go from one to the other would take thousands or millions of years. But I now ask you to look precisely at one, and then precisely at the other.”
“OK,” I said, “I did it.”
“It took a second, do you think?” he said.
“No more,” I said.
“Even if you’d taken an hour,” he said, “something would have passed between where those two heavenly bodies used to be, at, conservatively speaking, a million times the speed of light.”
“What was it?” I said.
“Your awareness,” he said. “That is a new quality in the universe, which exists only because there are human beings. Physicists must from now on, when pondering the secrets of the cosmos, factor in not only energy and matter and time, but something very new and beautiful, which is human awareness.”
He paused.
This was his finale: “I have thought of a better word than awareness,” he said. “Let us call it soul.”
Yes, let’s!
