Friday, August 22, 2008

Most of my thinking time recently has been taken up with thinking about explorers.

I figure that, when explorers first started going out and finding things, there were only a few of them and they wrote home with all sorts of fantastic descriptions of what they had seen and also what they had heard. A mammal with a bird's bill that lays eggs, and people with mouths in their chests. But I don't think that they often came home, not in the beginning, because why go back when there was still so much forward to discover? And no one would believe that these fantastic beings could exist, not without running their own eyes over them.

But then there were more and more people getting on boats to have a look around, seduced by the possibility of something new. And they came back, bringing with them samples of some of what no one had wanted to believe in. Which probably called into question everything that everyone knew that they didn't know, right? If some of the impossible was true, was all of it? Are there monsters at the edges of our maps and giant people behind trees with only a single eye in the middle of their forehead?

I think that the answer is yes. The world is always bigger than we give it credit for.

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