“I was traveling and barely understood how I’d ended up there on a Ferris wheel at night, dangling above a town I didn’t know, thousands of miles from anyone I knew well, looking out at the dark cliffs, ocean, and sky. The universe finally took on for me the full magnitude of its breadth and I felt impossibly small in it, much smaller than a component of the grain of dust that, as Bachelard tells us, the 19th-century scholar Gaston Paris said Tom Thumb split with his head and proceeded to pass his entire body through.”
From Guernica this month, a lovely essay by Suzanne Menghraj on the concept of smallness, the miniature and the minute. She invokes the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics Of Space, she bemoans the association of cuteness with smallness and talks about taking dinners in a tiny hut.
