Atlas

In my house I have a very large atlas. It is too large to be really like an ordinary book; it feels like something a little different, with a different and particular sort of purpose, to contain the world. It is old without being quite venerable, an old National Geographical atlas with tough board covers, faded and fraying with use.

It isn't mine, though it makes me think I would like to own a big old atlas, with pages lying unevenly, protruding past the cover, corners softening. I borrowed it from the library for reasons I will hopefully find some time to write about, which isn't strictly allowed but the librarian is a friend of mine. So I hugged it close and carried it home.

It isn't like most atlases I know, in that the detailed maps are not physical-style maps, all green and brown with the place names hard to see. They are political maps. The seas are blue and the countries are great expanses of white, with the mountains shaded in in delicate brown, and different colours around the edges to denote borders. Which all leaves plenty of space for names - countries and states and counties and regions, islands and rivers, mountains and lakes, and most of all cities and towns, thousands upon thousands of them. The world seems quite a different sort of place drawn this way - less a real place made of rock and water and forests and so on, and more a place created in the drawing and the naming of it, a place made of paper, an unreal place. I like these blanker maps; they seem to offer possibilities.

So I have been poring over maps, and thinking about the nature of atlases.

I have been running my fingers over the map of home, and feeling very far away. It is such a familiar shape, but not really familiar - I couldn't really even draw the outline, or place many places at all. I do it now, with my fingers.

Looking at the map of Mexico, it is such a familiar outline now too, but where I am within it surprises me. I don't really feel like I am here, in this map, at all.

I have been looking at exotic places I want to go one day... except that they don't seem exotic, just inscrutable shapes on a page.

The place that seems really fascinating, full of mystery, compelling me back to it, is home. My life will almost certainly unroll on these islands. Not the trips or the holidays, but the gritty stuff: the jobs, the houses, the love and loss, the ordinary and extraordinary days. I look at all the places and wonder what's going to happen to me, what I'll do, where I'll end up. I imagine the possibilities.

Atlases contain the future: all the places where all the things that are going to happen to us are going to happen.

An atlas like this holds the past, it guards a world lost to decades of ruthless time: the towns that are now great cities, the empty spaces where towns will grow, the colonial names that sound now stranger than the syllables that have replaced them.

The shapes stay constant but the writing is rewritten.

And, there is a future that the atlas does not see. As the seas rise, the atlas will stay constant to the world it remembers for us. And it cannot imagine the slow self-consumption of the earth: how the old continents will be drawn under and melted away, and new continents will grow, and everything will be forgotten - never mind Shakespeare, even the shape of the world will be otherwise entirely.

I think it is a relief to me that the Atlas remembers the world; that it stays true. It lifts the burden of memory, of keeping the world in mind to be sure that it is, and was. I do not know, or remember, but the Atlas does.