Everyone always talks about how New York City seems so huge and overwhelming to the casual interloper, how the mile-high skyscrapers loom over you and hammer home your infinite smallness in the world. Well, San Francisco does the same thing on a different axis: through the perpetual telescopic effect of the hilly topography, you can follow a street as it rises up into the sky, ten, twenty times more imposing than any skyscraper. Instead of just seeing what's immediately surrounding you on your block, you can also see, with stunning clarity, blocks that are miles in the distance, blanketed with dense rows of shoulder-to-shoulder houses that follow the gentle swells of the terraformed hilltops. Trying to locate yourself in relation to these floating urban islands is like trying to suss out a Necker cube -- squint and focus as hard as you might, you will still see only one facet at a time, either the forward-projecting or the backward-projecting one. But, in spite of the futility, your mind aches to put them together into a coherent picture that captures both.
It's tempting to make an analogy to the human perception of present and past. The mind, when confronted with people and places from the past, strains to perform the impossible mental operation of reconciling two perspectives. One of them is concrete and tangible, and the other is a glimmering road snaking upward into the horizon -- and while you can see it unfold with surprising detail, much more detail than the blunt close-up face of the present, you know that stretching your fingertips out to touch it would be entirely in vain.
I know it and I try anyway, because my mind loves puzzles and paradoxes, because life in just three dimensions is never quite good enough.
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