Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from April 15, 2007

What is it about miniatures?

Cut and paste the link below to an amazing DIY miniature version of Bag End, Bilbo and Frodo's ancestral home. http://community.livejournal.com/little_world/39277.html?view=211565 Unbelievable. What, indeed, is it about miniatures? Doll houses, dioramas, model train layouts, all endlessly fascinating. I'm not sure if it's the "let's play God!" impulse, or a translation of that urge that drives us to climb mountains and seek out high places--that the more we can see around us, the more time we'll have to react to whatever it is that might be coming to kill and eat us. Which could be another way to play God. Bolstering the illusion of delaying the inevitable lets us push away the nihilism that can creep in as we play out our lives. It's almost a counterbalance to the myriad of small and large deaths and reminders of death that fill each day. One of the connections Harry Frankfurt makes in On Bullshit (which I just read Thursday for a class presentation