Ambivalences of Vastness
Straining Beyond the Mesoscopic Scale
We are mesoscopic creatures. We live our lives within a middle range of objects, distances, durations, and causes to which our perceptual and cognitive capacities seem reasonably well adapted. And yet, oddly, we are also creatures who strain against this given scale. We peer outward into cosmic space, backward into deep time, downward into the quantum, and sideways into immensities of complexity and possibility that we can represent but never quite grasp. Sometimes these glimpses console us: our everyday troubles shrink against the Big Picture. Sometimes the same diminishment terrifies. Is this cosmic horror or cosmic consolation?
I take this ambivalence as an ontological clue to a deeper predicament. Human beings are frame-bound creatures who nevertheless possess a remarkable capacity for frame breaking—for glimpsing beyond the conditions of ordinary intelligibility without ever quite escaping them. Through science, education, and culture we assimilate such astonishments into everydayness, only periodically to rediscover their strangeness. Why this restless movement between assimilation and de-assimilation? Why not simply remain comfortably within our scale? And what might this peculiar drive toward the borders of intelligibility reveal about us?
