“All I knew was that I seemed to be suffering a crisis of scale. America was taking up a larger part of my mind than it ever had before. It was dominating my internal landscape, crowding out other thoughts, blocking my view of regular life. I couldn’t tell if it was reaching its proper size, growing the way a problem tends to grow just before a solution is found, or if it was swelling the way an organ does before it fails and bursts.”
Like Sam Anderson in this fine piece and Jon Mooallem in another NYT Magazine story from last week, I’ve been thinking a lot about scale lately. I’ve been thinking, at 28, about the weight of material possessions against my life, the distances from home I’ve traveled (and have yet to travel), the conflicts between the swelling past and the contracting future, and how looking at a clock tends to feel like standing on a roof, repairing a weathervane in high winds.
Sandy 