The Pursuit of Mappiness

If we spin the globe back about 550.5 revolutions, right to left, rest our finger on a point a few millimetres up the east coast of Australia (our sphere is scaled for maximum microcosmic force), and compare our suspended image of a past world with that of the present, we might notice one fundamental, equilibrium shifting difference: it was about then that I threw my weight - 1% water, 99% classical dictionary - on a plane and leapfrogged from Sydney to here, this here low-lying corner of England. You felt the earth move, right? Even if I grudgingly acknowledge different levels of impact on different observers, the move was made, and here I am, which allows me to say with all sincerity and zero affectation that strangely beautiful phrase: there I was. Yep, I'm lost as well.

So there I was - which is to say here I am - at my desk rehearsing cliches about the vast dimensions of this small world and the telescopic outreaches to those gigantic stars and how not even an instrument of infinite magnification could ever give us an image of what we really want - the whole universe in our field of vision - but nor could it ever limit our ability to imagine the parallel universes we'll never see until we wrestle free of our own. These mental journeys are not particularly sophisticated; I'm probably just replaying a jumble of semi-recollected scenes from various Star Wars films. But whenever I grapple with these unfathomables my head floats, my heart beats and I almost feel moist in those organs of vision - threatening to cry for their own loss, no doubt, because they know what they'll never see. This feeling always takes me by surprise, particularly for being replicable at will. Emotions - strong, unmistakeable quakes - are a very rare thing in my daily life. Thus they arrive ever unexpected. But where does this pleasant turbulence spring from? Is this 'awe' akin to what a devout Catholic feels when she nods up to the ceiling of St Peter's? Have I sold out and started worshipping at the altar of the 'universe' because I'm too lazy to look for real answers?

These sensations rarely last more than a paragraph before they come crashing back to earth. This shuttle has landed back in Sydney. At some stage - whether it was in high school or slightly later - I developed a reputation among friends for having a good sense of direction. This talent, to make street-level orienteering sound jazzier than it is, can be a blessing and a curse in equal measure. On the one hand, having a traveller who 'knows where they're going' can reduce the gnawing stress unavoidably tied to being in a new place. On the other, the mind mapper gets blamed at the merest hint of becoming lost, and friends with equal senses of direction but less confidence are always waiting in the wings to catch you out. Anyway, for reasons shrouded in the mysteries of group dynamics, I became the guy with the directions. I always found this task a bit uncomfortable, mostly because I hate leadership and am very happily married to my passivity, thank you. And yet, social phenomena aside, I can't deny that this role probably arose from a shameful geekery towards maps. If I drop artistic pretensions for this sentence, I freely admit that I would have the Louvre bombed and the Mona Lisa weeping sooty tears in exchange for a comprehensive collection of the history of cartography. I could stare at a mid-scale map of central Adelaide for much longer than I could/did stare at Guernica. If exiled to a desert island, I would take a map. It would save me having to walk around the island for an eyeball. And, well, I could find my way back home too.

The map is the most simultaneously useful and beautiful concept imaginable - dir, anyone could see that - but whence my particular love? In my official biography, I read that the seeds were sown in childhood (dir again). I wouldn't call my pop a keen traveller, but he was definitely a keen daytripper: we would go for long drives into the hinterland of New South Wales, try the city car on dirt roads, move along squiggly lines with no avowed purpose other than to see a few trees. Many of the hours I spent in the passenger seat of these trips - and other, shorter trips, since we were always driving somewhere, for food, for computer showrooms, for power tools at bargain prices - were spent with one of the only two books in the car. I wasn't interested enough in automotive mechanics to read the manual, so one option remained for me: the street directory. In truth, there was more than one; whether out of a mild form of OCD prohibiting him from ever throwing a printed product in the bin, or a high-minded appreciation for the cartographical art (for the record dad, if you're reading this, I'll always believe in the latter), father would always keep to hand a good selection of the major highlights in the previous thirty years of Sydney street directories. I would pick the one that lay closest, even if the suburb we were travelling through wasn't invented in the time of publication. And I would 'read'. Turning to a page at random (unless I had a backlog of interesting places to look up), I'd get to know the major roads, waterways and points of interest: parks, cemeteries, golf courses, public, private, catholic schools, community centres. Everything represented by richly coloured symbols. I traversed the main routes, the big black snakes, and the back roads, the little white ones - occasionally wandering onto secondary arteries coloured in yellow. Even the smallest red circle, filled (traffic light) or outlined (roundabout), was worthy of remark. I could brazenly flout convention and head the wrong way down a one-way street, turn right at a no-right-turn; it was just me and a post-apocalyptically empty metropolis. So this was what the people meant when they urged you to reclaim the streets.

I suppose I could see this as preliminary to that very Australian rite of passage: the day of the driver's license. But I'm not certain I had a genuine desire to realise these marks on a map; and if I did, they were inevitably less interesting in the flesh. There was one stalwart location I kept flicking back to (I may even have had it dog-eared): the Port Hacking estuary at the extreme southern border of greater Sydney. This harbour always tickled me. The mapmaker had decided to represent the sandbanks beneath the water by drawing vast stretches of golden sand peninsulas prodding far into the blue. What a fantastic place that must be - I thought - where one could stroll along sandy highways and be surrounded on both sides by crystalline water. A pacific paradise on the drab frontier of suburban Sydney. Ten years later, I visited the place for real. The sand banks were quite big. But they were mainly submerged. If I'd wanted very shallow water, I would have treated myself to a kiddie pool. It's only weird if you take a camera.

Through the underrated paedagogical medium of mediocre sandbanks, I learned a very important, very late lesson: the street directory could often give you what actual experience couldn't. One memorable session I devoted to the Cook's river, a lesser known tributary in southern Sydney: I traced it through many maps, as far as I could, through backyards and disused mattress factories. I remember the joy of pinning the point where it turns from natural bank to concrete drain. Man, it was sweet. How much more lovely was the pure blue of represented water than the murky brown sludge of an industry-lined river barely worthy of the name. In the street directory, civilisation worked perfectly. Everyone could get everywhere anytime through a seamlessly linked supernetwork of roads and Presbyterian churches. The streets of drug-ridden Cabramatta looked the same as the streets of moneyed Vaucluse. There was no symbol for knife crime. The street directory looked at society from so far above that an ideal egalitarian space was created. To this day I continue to labour under the misapprehension that squinting can play a part in social justice.

So a childhood largely taken with consultation of street directories must have something to do with it. There was also the possession of the huge illustrated Atlas, replete with pretty pictures and 'world's biggest' facts - but that story more properly belongs to an aetiology of my current fascination with the biggest things in the world. In any case, as I grow old and jaded, the map is the source of more and more happiness. When in London, I'm that guy who stands right in front of the tube map for minutes and bars you from quickly checking you're on the appropriate line. I'm the only human in the map section at Border's. I'm the brave soldier who takes his life in his hands every time he crosses the road in an unfamiliar place - for he would rather look where he's going in a two dimensional format. And, perhaps most embarrassingly of all, I'm the man who reads a map for non-utilitarian reasons. I went to bed with a nice miniature A-Z of London the other night. It was the most direct route to sweet dreams.

The urge to map is definitely implicated in games of knowledge and power - a place mapped is a place known, and a place conquered - but I refuse to think that the pleasure of the map is just about pushing my megalomaniac buttons. At least in surveying the dense webs of a big city, there is something satisfying about the chaos of it all; much as we plan for it, it's nigh impossible for the human population to grow in simple geometric patterns. But there is also a stout beauty to a good grid. I look at a large map and maybe I see a large metaphor: sometimes we people get it straight, sometimes hopelessly crooked, sometimes the landscape bends us to its will. We detour and diffract. But we get there eventually. A way can always be found; each place always every other place, merged via colourful lines of unmappable potential.

That wasn't about Cambridge, but I'm sure you can find your way back.