With regard to the integration of craft and technology, of the built and natural worlds, of abstract and concrete concepts, there is hardly any tool that compares to a map. The sheer existence of cartography, of spatial representation of all kinds, expresses something really special about humanity: that we have both the capacity and the unceasing motivation to simultaneously conceive of ourselves both in our immediate surroundings at eye level, and within a much broader context from a bird's eye view.
What does it say about us that as involved as we are in the immersive experience of daily life, the places we go, the way from here to work and to the grocery store -- as real as all of that is to us, we have an awareness that this place where I stand in the middle of my map, is in the midst of places beyond places? That's something lovely and remarkable about humankind. We can conceptualize about ourselves in the midst of many very real places beyond, even places unknown. It drives us across the world, to the bottom of the sea, and into outer space. Broadly speaking, humans have historically considered it to be the inherent responsibility and destiny of our species, to find out what's out there, and we've used all sorts of maps to chart the way.
As often as people have used exploration as an occasion for division and injustice, and have drawn distinctions between our own people and those people over there, we've never actually found strangers. Various groups of people explored the world, and they met other people. Maps have been helping human beings to come across one another for as long as we've been using them.
We use maps because we want to know what's over there, or how to get from here to there, and just how big that space is, that distance that would take me 13 days to walk on foot but only a few hours in a car. Humans look at that space and wonder, "what does it mean?" Because I am so much bigger than the size of me. I have entire sections of cities in my head. When I see my whole town as a dot among dots, what does it mean that it's that far from here to there? The question, "Where am I?" expands all around us for literally infinite space, and that's a bit too scary. So a map sets a boundary for how much space we are talking about, and helps us ensnare that distance in the grips of our comprehension. I can read a map and gain context for my world, and understand my physical existence a bit more realistically.
I read the map till I can say, not only am I in my neighborhood, but I'm on the west side of my town, near the border of my state, in the southeastern part of my nation, very near the edge of an ocean, at the same latitude as a place over there in Africa, and I, a human being who can't even see across the room without my glasses, can better understand what on earth it means to be on the earth. And understanding that we have a place in space and a place with respect to each other, is part of what's marvelous about being human creatures.
So maps are a very special human tool, that both extract us from the world and ground us in it, making us both very big and very small, for the purpose of connecting us as human beings, with one another.
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