The Radius of Human Experience
Here’s a little game I sometimes play when I’m bored. Works best in the denser urban environments, but you can play it anywhere. It helps to believe that pretty much anything a human can do is being done by someone somewhere at any given moment (although you can switch this thought off when you’re done).
Imagining yourself at the centre of a circle, how far do you have to expand the radius of that circle until you’ve encompassed all of human experience?
For example, looking out of my window right now I can see my neighbour gardening. A radius of 10 metres or so encompasses gardening. As the radius expands, the circle it describes begins to contain more activity. A little further and there’s shopping, studying, playing in parks with toddlers. A slight acceleration of the imagination begins to admit things like recovering from hangovers, spousal abuse, reneging on promises, finally playing a Bach prelude without an error for the first time.
Somewhere a teenager smokes pot for the first time while an older, more experienced and already red-eyed friend nods sagely. People are having sex, but at 12:30 on a Sunday afternoon, how far must we expand the circle to include them? Somewhere there is a car accident occuring, a concert, a fight, a Tupperware party, a religious epiphany. A girl gets into a car with a man she doesn’t know. A child is born with a vestigial tail, or is polydactyl. A young man, stealing furtive glances at himself in a full-length mirror, tries on a woman’s clothing for the first time, every cell in his body alert to the crunch of wheels on gravel that tells him his parents are home. A woman is being circumcised, another’s eyes well with tears as her beau produces a diamond ring. Somebody tells a lie. Somebody stubs out the last cigarette they will ever smoke while a primary school student, already nauseous with anticipation, lights his first. Somebody fucks a species not their own. A catastrophe is averted, or inadvertantly videotaped. A woman opens a letter which will alter the course of her life.
The radius zooms outward, lagging our imaginations by a few hundred metres or so, until the circle collapses on itself at a point diametrically opposite us on the other side of the world (where, we imagine, sits a person playing this same game).
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Posted to Oh, the Humanity • 2002.10.20 (Sun) • 12:44
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