I love seeing the red dot on those stationary public maps in an unfamiliar place: “You Are Here.” I love that the place where the map stands was there before I arrived and will remain after I’ve moved on. It’s not like your phone’s GPS showing you as the center of the universe—or the Uber map where that coveted role temporarily goes to your approaching driver. No, it’s the real world that Copernicus grabbed hold of to shatter Christian illusions that the sun and planets revolve around the Earth.
The red dot is humbling—a minor footnote to Carl Sagan’s pale blue one. The red dot says that you are the variable, whereas this place (museum, town square, whatever) is the constant with longitude and latitude. Many among the more privileged of us have spent a year and a half being paid for our non-physical presence. We didn’t have to get dressed for things, didn’t have to put money on our Metro Cards or gas in the tank. We had only to trudge as far as our phones and laptops. Our lives became impressionistic, the question of when we’d return to the workplace as fog-shrouded as Monet’s Houses of Parliament.
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