Contempt and awe seldom wed, but height may make a match between them. One of the intermittent rewards of flying is the thought-provoking perspective it provides: We look down upon great cities reduced to anonymous gray smudges, or the lights of a solitary car speeding alone at midnight across a canvas of black velvet. The latter makes us reflect upon the unimagined lives of strangers — where is she going? what is he thinking about? — and the former upon the unimaginable multiplicity of such lives, each one a world, and yet each also a brief vestige upon the face of the land. Size had better not matter.
It was therefore with emotion that I learned, from my next-door neighbor, that I was to be seen on the Google “street view” of the intersection just below our houses. I looked, and indeed there I was. My face, along with a couple of license plates, was blurred from fear of lawyers, but my body, returning from the espresso joint down the street, coffee in right hand, newspapers under left arm, had been caught in a fortuitous space-time intersection with the Google camera-car, which, in spite of its resembling a rolling planetarium, I had entirely failed to notice.
