“Why don’t you show us where to go this time.” My dad says, handing me the torn and stained map of Tiger Mountain. Well loved by careless dirty fingers pulling at the pages during our frequent hikes through this forest.
“Okay!” I say eagerly, excited for the responsibility of keeping us on track as we traverse across the trails. It’s a job I’ve watched my parents do a countless times, always letting me help and teaching me how it works.
“Here’s where we are,” he says, pointing to a dot on the page, “We’re going to go around this way, to the bottom of that lake, and come back here, where we started.”
I study the map carefully, attempting to line it up with the trail we had just begun walking on, and the one my dad had pointed out on the …show more content…
They are a tool of discovery, and contain a hope for what is ahead. There are maps that took explorers through the underdiscovered west. Maps that sailed the Spanish across to a new world. Attempts to capture the world from hundreds of years ago that now seem comical, given the accuracy we now appreciate. The Berlin Conference, where rulers of half the world stood around a table, drawing lines through an unfamiliar land, declaring the future on a piece of paper. While the consequences of these maps vary greatly, they are, at their core, an attempt to understand something unreachable. A search and constant urge for discovery is an attempt to answer “...the tragic mystery of our perishable condition. The silence of God. The unbearable silence of God” (Dominique de Menil, commenting on the Rothko Chapel). Now, maps may not be a quest to find some religious imperative, but they represent a guide to the unknown. They give us a glimpse into a truth that is bigger than us, and something we can hardly comprehend. The size of the universe around us, the minute complexities of its terrain. Maps attempt to satisfy a quintessential element of the human condition, a search for the
“Okay!” I say eagerly, excited for the responsibility of keeping us on track as we traverse across the trails. It’s a job I’ve watched my parents do a countless times, always letting me help and teaching me how it works.
“Here’s where we are,” he says, pointing to a dot on the page, “We’re going to go around this way, to the bottom of that lake, and come back here, where we started.”
I study the map carefully, attempting to line it up with the trail we had just begun walking on, and the one my dad had pointed out on the …show more content…
They are a tool of discovery, and contain a hope for what is ahead. There are maps that took explorers through the underdiscovered west. Maps that sailed the Spanish across to a new world. Attempts to capture the world from hundreds of years ago that now seem comical, given the accuracy we now appreciate. The Berlin Conference, where rulers of half the world stood around a table, drawing lines through an unfamiliar land, declaring the future on a piece of paper. While the consequences of these maps vary greatly, they are, at their core, an attempt to understand something unreachable. A search and constant urge for discovery is an attempt to answer “...the tragic mystery of our perishable condition. The silence of God. The unbearable silence of God” (Dominique de Menil, commenting on the Rothko Chapel). Now, maps may not be a quest to find some religious imperative, but they represent a guide to the unknown. They give us a glimpse into a truth that is bigger than us, and something we can hardly comprehend. The size of the universe around us, the minute complexities of its terrain. Maps attempt to satisfy a quintessential element of the human condition, a search for the