so this is what it's like to be god
I often ruminate on simultaneity: an inescapable theme, given the elevated perspective of the historian. as I've elsewhen written, my sense of perspective is totally ingrown: the intellectual legacy of a childhood that fatefully involved a model globe, and therefore an inculcated & wholly irredeemable sense of scale. every now and then I am quite bowled over by the incredible density of lives on this planet: how in any one day -- say today, walking down King's Parade -- I trail the skein of my life behind me and snag hundreds of thousands of others; I brush almost imperceptibly against a panoply of other lives; I am a background figure in countless tourist photographs in which these fleeting, ephemeral moments of intersection are, ironically, frozen solid. when I think of how very large and real my own life seems to me -- every second played up close in interminable detail in front of my eyes -- my imagination collapses when I attempt to multiply this tenfold, let alone six-billion-fold. arithmetically aggregating my own reality will not give me the sum total of humanity's experience.
(this is why, incidentally, we need historians: fumbling negotiators of that strange land between the minute particular and the unfathomable general, which only something godlike, or at least mildly seraphic, could inhabit gracefully).
at any rate, that is why things like this blow my mind & I just lost about thirteen interminable minutes of my own particular reality watching this unfathomable plenitude of other lives.