Between the beeping, reversing and drilling, the cuboids rise and the cosmos seems to be getting further and further away.
In a sense, this makes the universe bigger, or at least one's experience of it. No longer will we see the stars, just inches away from the corners of our imagination, reliably protruding from the darkness of night. The stars, now relegated to the realms of myth or astronomy, are no longer present in the game of the five senses and as such appear to retreat to some immeasurable place.
As the cuboids rise so do my expectations of the world and all within it, and so do my notions of the future and of progress. Here they are before me, these great offspring of the industrial revolution, convincing me, drowning out the sky. The future is just a few floors away!
In a sense, this makes the city bigger. We climb up and down as well as forwards and from side to side. No longer does the crow fly in one due compass direction, but vacillates between one preferred angle and another, chooses its aversion of obstacles wisely, loses its way. All of this recalculating takes longer, and the longer something takes the bigger it was in the first instance; the bigger a hurdle, the larger the space in which it is contained.
Yes, all this progress makes the world infinitely bigger; we queue and we wait and we want and we need and the piles of correspondence “retained for our own records” expand alongside the universe's outer regions. We stand atop these shaky piles of documentation (each pile proclaiming something crucial about our livelihoods, our personalities) and admire the view. We lack so much, the world could never hope to hold us.
We see the sky in slender lines between the infinitely tall walls of our good future. We scorn the days when people believed the sky was no more than 12 or 13 miles away. We know about space: it is everything that exists outside these walls which bind us tighter; it is everything not enmeshed between telephone lines and all-but-ubiquitous electrical signals; it is all that which does not clock in daily; it is another frightening Sunday.
Space used to mean days and days between oneself and the next trace of a human breath. Space used to mean waiting months for telegrams, and not talking about our feelings until we lay sweating on our deathbeds. We used to be like the stars; still and strong, and so far from one another. Now, space means a little gap between my hand and yours, a small pocket of air between all the holding on, a few atoms to define our essential separation.
Life is a lot easier if we go around the houses. No need to question why they are there in the first place. Just stand in line and look both ways.
Lydia Unsworth is the author of The End of March.