Everybody has moments when the world gets suddenly much much bigger that one has previously imagined. One of mine came in the Science Museum of London, in the summer between fifth and sixth grade. We were on a family vacation there for six weeks, and my mind was already being blown by the fact that there was this Entirely Different Country out there, with totally different ways of talking, eating, and driving. Somewhere in this huge maze of a museum (which my brother and I insisted on dragging my parents through for two days, if memory serves me right), this film loop was playing:
The narrator was cheesy, the music was like a circus calliope gone horribly wrong, and my young brain was Utterly Transfixed. The movie has remained in the back of my mind all these years, but I've been thinking about it more and more since we've come to China.
Once you start seeing yourself as a small point along an exponential continuum that extends infinitely in both directions, it's hard to see the world in the same way again...
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