The Size of the World
Most of the city lights are way down, bright but small and far away like nursery glitter. There are some other buildings as tall as our hotel, of course, and I look at them. They stare back. “We’re in the biggest city in the world, you know?” I say to my girlfriend, who is sitting on the bed.
“It’s hard to believe,” she says. “Somehow it makes the world feel so small.”
I feel what she means. Being in Tokyo, and Japan more broadly, made the world feel small in ways I hadn’t ever known. But pondering the size of the world was the last thing I expected to do as a result of spending a couple of weeks in Japan. After all, I’d traveled to new places before, right?
— — —
It’s always been easy to yearn for far away things and places and people. To create a fantasy version of the world in your head. This has been true for as long as humans have walked the planet. We are yearners, and to date no human has actually been everywhere. There is always something new out there. And, if one day there isn’t, I guess we have outer space.
I have fueled a lot of my life’s adventures with this idea. I would love places I visited but about halfway through I would become even more excited about the next. Novelty is a kind of drug. And part of this feeling is the size of the world. Like when you see a nicely-edited clip of some foreign place in some foreign country; a meal around a dinner table or a view from an old temple. If you’re anything like me, that video doesn’t just make you think: I’d like to go there, it makes you think: What a huge and wonderful world we live in. That’s why I like watching those videos, and reading about far away places. I am reminded of how infinite our world is. Or seems.
But then you start going places. In Switzerland, I wondered: Is this the best place in the world? It is certainly the best place to hike in mountains and enjoy rosti for dinner in a cozy hotel. Which is a comforting thought if you are spending a lot to travel there. But it’s also scary. What does it mean now that you have seen the best? Where do you go from here? It’s like eating the best steak of your life at a churrascaria in Brazil and then returning home to Outback. Have I beaten the game?
If you play video games you will know there is a feeling you get when you reach the edge of the map. All of a sudden the immersive, living world you were playing in comes to a halt. You literally cannot progress further. You are trapped by an invisible wall. This is how I feel when I realize the world might be smaller than I think. Oh, that’s really it. The first time this happened to me as a kid was in Assassin’s Creed: 2. I quietly turned around from the grey-ish invisible wall and jumped back down into the virtual city of Florence, which now felt faker and smaller than it had before. I tried to forget.
Because, to be honest, I want the world to be bigger than I can imagine.
— — —
Perhaps Japan triggered these worries because it always felt so foreign. “I’ve never been to Asia,” I would tell people. And I had not particularly planned on it; it was nice having a whole world to never explore.
But then I did go. And I saw Tokyo, and its temples, and its tall new neighborhoods, and the few that survived the war. We ate ramen, and sushi, and curry, and fried chicken, and wagyu beef. We walked old streets in Kanazawa and danced in a summer festival in Osaka. We spent the night in a ryokan in the mountains. And all at once, so many of these things I had dreamed about were now part of my waking memory. And now everything felt smaller. Well, I guess I have done that now.
I had been to Japan, I realized, and not just that but I had been to the biggest city in the world. Now the fog of war on the video game map was cleared. The invisible wall was closer than ever. I had seen things that I had dreamt about for years. Maybe I ate the best sushi I will ever eat. It makes me wonder how people who have visited every country in the world feel. Do they think about this?
— — —
“I’m not sure how to feel about it,” I say finally.
“Me neither,” she says, and clicks off the lamp. I stare out at the buildings, the city, the horizon a little longer. Did you know in Tokyo there are so many big buildings that they all have red lights on top of them so that helicopters and planes can navigate at night? That’s some big city stuff.
Looking out at the city does not make me feel any better about the size of the world. So I do the thing I have done in hotels for as long as I can remember: I turn on the television. Faces spring to life, people I don’t know speaking a language I hardly understand, eating and drinking in places I will probably never see. Music plays, sounds that I doubt I will ever enjoy again. There’s a jingle I don’t know, an ad for a product I won’t buy. And as I wander to the edge of sleep and the voices become a beautifully dull choir somewhere far away, I think: maybe the world is a really big place after all.