Science fiction and fantasy has a way with kicking your brain into a whole new perspective.

I never did finish the entire Dark Tower series by Stephen King. I started it in high school, after picking up an old collection in the library, but it became one of those chores to track down all the books, and the right editions to go with each other (the chapter cutoffs were bizarre if memory serves me correctly here), and I gave it up.

Then, in 2024 Ben Hunt wrote a piece that took me back 25+ years to discovering the beginnings of the series (also worth a read, for free, over on Panoptica), and by the powers vested in me (re: Amazon) I dove back in, and have been working my way through them, albeit slowly.

There’s a speech in Book 1, by a character we only know as the Man in Black, that deserves to be in my Personal Archive. It’s about the idea of size. More specifically, it’s about the magical mystery of size.

I’ll start with a short quote,

Not life, but size.

And the thread goes on.

He talks about how a kid will ask what lies beyond the sky, and space, and the galaxies - and how the father eventually has to tell the kid that nobody knows.

He talks about how a fish believes its lake is the universe - until it’s pulled out of the water and then reality, however briefly, completely changes.

He talks about measuring (and this is a personal favorite). How a pencil tip, once magnified, becomes a world of atoms and vast relative spaces between them, no matter how sharp and pointy that tip seems to us at our level.

There’s a dorm room philosophy angle to it, but there’s also a truth.

When you’re a teenager and it’s some cool sci-fi/fantasy cowboy stuff, you’re there for different reasons. As an adult, you see the layers behind the layers a writer of King’s caliber is pulling in. On purpose or not, he’s on some s***.

We suffer a limitation of perspective. Always. It’s only a flaw if we allow it to be one. It’s humbling if we refuse to forget that it’s there, or as King also puts it, if we refuse to forget the face of our father. I really understand it differently now, reading this as an adult.

Because that’s all perspective is. It’s informed by how you’re standing and where you’re looking with your amazing yet only evolution-optimized eyeballs. The dimensions and scale are all context, and we are getting the tiniest portion of context at any point in time.

Finding perspective is like a ballistics exercise. And if you’re Stephen King, telling a story of perspective is just following one bullet’s path through one subset of spacetime.

The face is the perspective. The face is what keeps us human. The face, in the face of the size and scale and enormity of life, is all we have to remember we are small, and despite everything, have responsibilities we can’t forget.