Weblogs: Historical vertigo

Blogopotamus!: "I [...] was positively overcome by an experience I shall call “historical vertigo” for want of a better description. It’s hard to explain what it is, but the “vertigo” metaphor works very well. It’s the experience of realizing that your own time and place is so limited that it isolates you from every other time and place, and somehow there’s a necessity to be there (everywhere), so you get as high as you can above the historical abyss and feel an indescribable yearning to plunge headlong into the void, even if you know you’ll lose everything in the process. But you can’t; you find yourself, unhappily, in your regular time and space, limited by the same historical constraints.

I have also experienced or been told about other forms of vertigo. There’s a spatial vertigo which comes from looking at maps and wishing to spread oneself out across every inch simultaneously, whose typical result is wanderlust. I have that impulse, and used to indulge it with random roadtrips to unknown locations at inconvenient times, where I hoped I would experience God or die. A friend tells me that C.S. Lewis often had this experience (which Lewis dubbed “joy,” and which forms the subject of his book “Surprised by Joy”) with regard to compelling imaginary worlds. Lewis assumed that such experiences were common and represented a longing for the direct experience of God; a nostalgia for all the vistas of experience that are natural to human beings, but were lost in the fall."