from THE ANTIOCH REVIEW
There was a period in my life when I knew the increments of an hour with pinpoint accuracy. What happened was this: my watch broke and when I didn’t immediately replace it, for reasons I no longer recall, to my surprise, I soon discovered that I didn’t need a watch at all. I started by clocks on buildings or the position of the sun or, when it was cloudy, the quality of the light. But though it happened gradually it seemed that all of a sudden I simply always knew what time it was. It was as if I had acquired a sixth sense. To be free of the tic of constantly checking my wrist was liberating. I always knew not only where in the world I was—41 st and Madison, say—but also when. That was a time in my life when what time it was mattered and, without a watch, I told time the old-fashioned way: by physically moving through it in space. This is simpler than it sounds if you live in New York, which is an easy place to tell time if you are afoot. A Manhattan block running along the north/ south axis is about a twentieth of a mile, and since I knew it took twenty minutes to walk twenty blocks at a brisk and even pace, I could not only calculate my arrival at my destination, but also self-correct along the way, calibrate, as it were, the measuring mechanism that was me. Late, I speeded up; later still, I ran the lights. I may have been a point on a graph, a walking Cartesian equation, blithely mapping my day with precision, but the physics of being in time felt less like science and more like dancing.
But what was transformational was the sense I had of being constantly present. Liberated from telling time, I owned time. It wasn’t really that I knew the time: I was time. And I cannot help but wonder
if perhaps this is why I remember the ordinary physical details of that period of my life with uncanny, almost hyper-real, cinematic vividness. And that it is perhaps the reason we remember childhood with such clarity—that perfect, timeless, period of our lives before we were taught to tell time and time became our master. The old, who feel that the older they get the less time they have, say that youth is wasted on the young, but it is really time that is wasted on the old.
A fifth, a finger, a foe; a jerk, a jigger, a dvop; a pottle, a pood, a pai asang. A poppy seed, a barley com, a scruple' a quintal, a quire, a parsec. The lexicon of measurement bounces and sizzles 1 with sound, but look them up and they have meanings. A windle is 3-3 1/2 bushels of grain, a pottle half a gallon. But the particular beauty of measurement words is that they are more than signifiers of volume, distance, size. They are words, and as words are tropes, metaphors, small poems grounded in the human experience while reaching to describe the indescribable and somehow managing the job. They are windows through which we can view not only the past, but human nature itself, telling us what we measured and how. A cord of wood was a good amount, a cartload what a cart could hold, and the size of a hogshead depended on what was in it, oil, say, or wine, and where it had been filled: London or an outlying shire. A plethron was Greek for the amount of land a yoke of oxen could plough in a day; parasang was the Persian word for the distance a man could walk in an hour. The poppyseed was the elemental unit of length in Anglo Saxon England: four made a barley com and twenty barley corns made a scruple, which was a unit of measure that would be about the size and weight of a small pebble. A scruple is no longer a measure, but what keeps us, as if we had a pebble in our shoe, to a measured step.
Why do we measure? “To put order and coherence into the picture of nature,” said Aristotle. It is our nature; we have always measured; it is in all the recorded histories. We seek patterns, we tell stories, we make things—pillars, pyramids, paintings, poems—and we measure. And though we take it for granted, “in stride,” as it were, clock-time and measurable space are man-, not nature-made. If not our earliest invention, it is perhaps our best, for it is the one that made all others possible. The history of man is the history of measure; of measure, man.
It starts with wonder. How far away is the moon? Aristarchus of Samos calculated the distance as 240,000 miles, which it is when it is
closest to Earth in its elliptical, not circular, orbit. How many grains of sand would fit in the universe? After first inventing large numbers, Archimedes, the mathematics genius bom in 276 b.c., and whom Horace called “the measurer of earth and ocean and numberless sand,” came up with ten to the power of sixty-three. But he did not say ten to the power of sixty-three. The metric system hadn’t been invented yet. One of the fiercest proponents for the creation of the metric system was Carl Friedrich Gauss (who ranks with Archimedes and Newton). Rather than praise Archimedes for all he achieved, Gauss took the ancient Greek to task for not also inventing the metric system. “To what heights would science now be raised if Archimedes had made that discovery!” he wrote in 1832 in a letter urging the French Republic to adopt decimals.
Standardizing measurement seems like a good idea, one naturally bom, as it was, of the so-called Age of Reason, but as reasonable an idea as it is, we continue to inch along. We take a measured step. We weigh our words before we speak, our options before we decide. We raise or lower the bar, size up our adversaries, tell tall tales, gauge our progress. It is as if measuring, like making metaphors, is simply what the brain does as it tries to make sense of the world.
The beauty of words is that they are unstable—they change, they stretch, they have various and multiple meanings—but the beauty of numbers is that they are not. The move to metric measurement has meant a move from words—jigger, pottle, nip—and their maddening refusal to remain fixed as if to remain constant is death itself, which, it turns, out, it is—to numbers. It has been a move, specifically, to numbers of ten. This is quite efficient. It means that the size of everything, from the diameter of a proton, which is 10 to the power of minus 15, to the size of the entire non-visible universe (according to cosmic inflation theory), which is 10 to the power of 53, can be described in one simple, systematic way. The whole world, from molecules on a DNA helix to the length of the Trans Siberian Railroad, can be described as a power of ten, as if we are all one family of Russian stacking dolls. Pretty neat trick, but does it work? Is it not too perfect? Are we really only a string of zeroes?
Nature is random, relative, uncertain, unpredictable, messy, cluttered, chaotic. It can be harsh, cold, difficult, unyielding. But does this diminish its beauty? Is it not in its so-called imperfection that its beauty lies? There must be a reason that a single imperfection on an otherwise unblemished face is called a beauty mark. Gothic cathedral builders
knew the reason. They always added at least one mistake to make the building accessible; it was at the point of imperfection, they believed, that the human imagination could enter.
Brought forward to the twentieth century, Gauss’s argument would claim that it was the metric system of measurement that allowed scientists not only to measure the size of a proton or the rate of the expansion of the universe, but to know these things at all. Measurement is an instrument to knowing. To know something, we measure it. Once measured, we know it. In the beginning, we measured what we knew: the length of Egypt, the perimeter of a pyramid, the height of a horse. Now we know because we measure. To measure is to know, to know is to measure. But measuring as a means to knowledge is limited. It is limiting because it is self-defining. Measuring to know, we know what we measure. Once we measure it, it is a thing measured, but is it anything more?
Or is measuring merely a compulsion? In 2002, Yasumasa Kanada led a nine-man team from the University of Tokyo to calculate pi to a trillion decimal places. It was Kanada’s fifteenth calculation; in his first, in 1982, he calculated pi to 8,388,576 decimal places. He is probably still working on it, climbing his private Everest. How far can we go? How fast can we get there? How difficult can we make the route?
Pi is an irrational number. An inch worm is a measure worm. A meter is the length light travels in 1/2999,792, 458* s of a second. A second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom. An inch is 0.0254 meters. It was in the Age of Reason, as it is called, that the metric system was created, passed by the French Revolutionary Assembly in 1795. On June 22, 1799, two platinum standards representing the meter and the kilogram were placed in the Archives de la Republique, where they remain. While most of the world has accepted SI, short for International System, or Systeme Internationale, the U.S. and Malaysia remain holdouts, though there is a strong argument for the standardization of measurement, and not only to ease global trade or even to defray confusion at the Olympics, where sprints are measured in meters but long jumps in inches. In 1999, the NASA Mars Climate Orbiter was destroyed on entering orbit due to the fact that different computer programs running the mission were using different measurement systems. In the same year the Korean Air cargo flight 6316 was lost on its way from Shanghai to Seoul when the crew
acted on tower instructions given in meters as if they had been given in feet. It has never been found.
A bit is the fundamental measure of what in information theory is called information content and is a single digit having two values. Four bits is a nibble. Eight bits is a byte. Sixteen bits is four nibbles, or two bytes, or a half a word. A word is the information transferred from one system to another in a single package.
There are 615,000 words in the Oxford English Dictionary. One of the earliest dictionaries, or word lists, as they were called, was Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabetical, published in 1604; it had 2,500 words, which explains why Shakespeare had to add thousands of new words to the lexicon. There weren’t enough to say all he had to say about the human condition, though Homer used a mere 1,500 different words in his odes and epics. Interestingly, both Globish, an international business language, and the Voice of America also use a vocabulary reduced to exactly 1,500 different words, though neither includes heart-grieving, swift-sailing, city-sacking, stout-hearted, silver-footed, wonder, wont, woo, wroth, weeping, pity, slay, spare, or sate.
Diction is the metrical arrangement of words. Meter, more or less regular rhythm, can be syllabic, meaning a certain number of syllables; accentual, meaning certain syllables are stressed; or accentual syllabic; or qualitative, which emphasizes duration over stress. In the 992-page Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, the entiy for “measure” occupies a mere fourteen lines. It is defined as “a metrical group or period.” Period. Not the be-all and end-all of verse.
Galileo, who had more than a few inventions of his own, said that the alphabet was mankind’s most stupendous invention of all.
Herodotus invented histoiy. He is called the father of recorded history because he was the first to record it, but what Herodotus did, essentially, was take the measure of the known world, its sights, its stories, and its size. It is from him that we know that the walls of Babylon were 335 feet high and 85 feet thick. And that a distance of a three-day journey was the line keeping friend from foe. The distance from the Maeotic lake (today’s Sea of Azov) to the river Phasis was “a thirty-day journey for an active traveler.” The length of the Caspian Sea was a rowing voyage of fifteen days; its breadth, eight. Lake Moer, he said was, “7 days journey from the sea” and the coastal length of Egypt 60 schoeni.
Ten Egyptian schoeni equaled twenty Persian parasangs equaled 600
English furlongs, a furlong being the length of a furrow, intentionally made to be the distance a team of oxen could plow without a rest 01 forty rods, or 10 chains, or 220 yards, or 660 feet, or an eighdi of a mile: it takes twelve to round the track at Belmont. Herodotus explained differing measures. “Men who are pinched for land, he wrote, measure by fathoms; those who are less pinched, by furlongs; those who have much by parasangs; those who have plenty, by schoeni. The paiasang is thirty furlongs, and the schoenus is sixty furlongs.” A Greek stadion was sixty steps, or about 200 meters, and a customary length, then as now, for a foot race.
“Man is the measure of all things” is more than probably the bestknown aphorism. It is a cornerstone of Western thought. The saying was Protagoras’ and comes to us from Plato, the wisest man in Greece of his time, and survives byway of Plato’s dialogue “Cratylus,’ in which Socrates addresses the nature of truth and in which he repeats this saying. But what does it mean that man is the measure of all things? And what did Protagoras mean? Man is the measure of all things if by all things we mean what man can measure? Or did Protagoras mean that man is the standard by which all things are measured? The first recorded measurement, as a hieroglyph on Egyptian walls, was the cubit, the distance from a man’s fingertip to his elbow. It was with the cubit, a square level, and a plumb bob the pyramids were built. The royal cubit was, of course, longer than the cubit. It was longer by three fingerbreadths. A fingerbreadth was the width of the middle of the middle finger. Using hands to measure, a digit was the width of the tip of the middle finger, called a nail in England. A palm was the width of four fingers held together; a span the distance from the tip of the thumb to the tip of the little finger on an outstretched hand.
But Protagoras was not talking about forearms, fingers, feet, or fathoms, the height of a man (six feet) and the customary depth of a grave. Protagoras was talking about truth, and the truth he was talking about was moral and the statement he was making was that there is no absolute moral truth, only what men believed and agreed to believe to be true, making each society’s belief as true as another’s. Today we call this moral relativism. Socrates and Plato, who believed in absolutes, disagreed fiercely.
If there are absolutes, who is the standard, against which others can measure themselves, for justice, for heroism, for beauty? The Trojan War was ostensibly waged to retrieve Agamemnon’s wife, Helen, the most beautiful woman in Greece. She was “the face,” as Christopher
Marlowe wrote in The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus, “that launched a thousand ships.” But was the war really fought for Helen, who, Herodotus related, had not been behind Troys walls at the time at all, but was in Egypt raising her sons? Which could be why The Iliad ends with no mention of rescuing Helen, only of the horrible death of Hector by Achilles. Helen remains the standard of beauty, Achilles of rage, Agamemnon ol revenge, Penelope, who waited twenty years for her husband’s return, of wifely fidelity, Odysseus of wiles.
In 1929, Moritz Schlick, the leader of the Vienna Circle, a group of cutting-edge physicists, published a booklet espousing the circles credo, transforming Protagoras’ saying from man to measure. “Man is the measure of all things. Whatever question is not susceptible to measurement ... is no question at all.” But we can measure nothing, too. Nullity is the mechanism by which scientists measure what they do not know, balancing what they can measure with what they cannot until the scale evens out and they know what they didn’t know by knowing its measure. Nullity is the way our nervous system works, a nervous system that can register pain in limbs that are not there.
What do we measure? Everything. We measure IQ, we measure earthquakes, we measure wind chill, wrenches, wire gauge, tornadoes, comas, grit, type; we measure the brightness of lunar eclipses; the hardness of pencils, of gypsum, of talc. We measure the brain activity of meditating monks (veiy high). We measure brain size. The encephalization quotient is the size of a brain relative to the size of the animal it’s in (humans 7, chimps 2); scientists think the measure has something to do with intelligence but they’re not sure what. We measure shoelaces: a shoe with four pairs of holes takes a sixty-centimeter-long lace. We measure consumer satisfaction, carbon emissions, the rate at which the permafrost is melting. We measure justice. Themis carries a scale to make this point: justice is not some abstract value; it is something we measure. We measure what matters to us; once measured, it matters more.
The first person to measure the earth was Eratosthenes, in 276 b.c., the chief librarian at the great library of Alexandria, where he read on one of the libraiy’s papyri about a city in which a column at noon on the summer solstice cast no shadow. Wondering if a stick planted in Alexandria, a twenty-mile voyage up the Nile from Syene, would also cast no shadow, when the next summer solstice came around, he planted one and when a shadow was cast, he knew the earth was curved. This was interesting, but he wasn’t trying to prove that the earth was round.
But knowing that it was, he knew he had to measure the earth, he needed to measure the curve. That the ratio of the cii'cumference of any circle to its diameter was slightly more than thiee, the ciiculai constant we call pi, was common knowledge in the ancient world, known independently in Egypt, Babylon, and the Indus Valley. So Eratosthenes was able to calculate that the Earth was 28,750 miles aiound. We measure it, at the equator, as 24,901 miles, making Eratosthenes’ calculation remarkably close, given that one of his dimensions, the distance from Alexandria to Syene, was paced out, but Eratosthenes great achievement was proving that the earth could be measured scientifically.
On a scale of one to ten, ten being the worst pain you can bear—I hate that question. I can never answer it. I don’t know how much pain I can bear and I don’t want to know. Even if I could bear a lot of pain, which when I don’t have any I think I can, it doesn t mean it wouldn t hurt. What if we measured pain differently? If pain were measured in inches, how tall would your pain be? My pain is as tall as a house, a skyscraper; it is as deep as a primordial sea; as distant as forgetting, as near as loss. In 1940, James D. Hardy, Herbert G. Wolff, and Helen Goodell, all of Cornell University, invented what they called the dolorimeter to measure pain scientifically. It was a good idea, but it didn’t wprk. Results could not be replicated. In 1971, Ronald Melzack and Warren Torgerson, psychologists of McGill University, invented what they called the McGill Pain Index, which broke ground by not using a machine and by not rating pain on a scale, but by providing patients with a vocabulary (organized in categories), with words to describe the pain they felt. These are the words doctors want to hear when they ask how it feels: flickering, pulsing, quivering, throbbing, beating, pounding, jumping, flashing, shooting, boring, drilling, stabbing, sharp, gritting, lacerating, pinching, pressing, gnawing, cramping, crushing, tugging, pulling, wrenching, hot, burning, scalding, searing, tingling, itching, smarting, stinging, dull, sore, aching, heavy, tender, taut, rasping, splitting, tiring, exhausting, sickening, suffocating, fearful, frightful, terrifying, punishing, grueling, cruel, vicious, killing, wretched, binding, annoying, troublesome, miserable, intense, unbearable, spreading, radiating, penetrating, piercing, tight, numb, squeezing, drawing, tearing, cool, cold, freezing, nagging, nauseating, agonizing, dreadful, torturing.
Justin O. Schmidt created the Schmidt Pain Index in 1984 to describe the pain caused by stings from saw flies, bees, and ants. The
sweat bees sting is, he wrote, “light, ephemeral, almost fruity, like a tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm,” while the sting from a tarantula hawk feels like “a blinding, fierce, shockingly electric pain, like having a running hair drier dropped into your bubble bath.” And a bite from a bullet ant causes “pure, intense, brilliant pain, like firewalking over flaming charcoal with a three-inch rusty nail in your heel.”
In acoustics, a sone is the unit of perceived loudness, the range being from 0.02 sone, the sound of calm breathing or leaves rustling, to 676: the human threshold of acoustic pain. The misery index was created in 1960 by the economist Arthur Okun when he was an advisor to Lyndon Johnson to measure the state of the economy. It is calculated by adding the unemployment rate and the inflation rate; these should move in opposite directions, inflation easing when unemployment rises and climbing as people get back to work. Jimmy Carter won the 1976 presidential election by citing a national miseiy index of 13.57 percent and claiming that no one responsible for that had the right to be president; when he was running again, it had reached 21.98 percent, the highest it has ever been since the index was invented. He lost. The Misery Index is closely tied to the Consumer Price Index, which is closely tied to the Consumer Satisfaction Index, which measures consumer happiness. In 1972, Bhutan’s King Jigme Singye Wangchuck dismissed criticism about his sluggish economy by claiming title to the index of Gross National Happiness to explain why his country was not as interested in developing manufacturing as it was in its Buddhist values.
How do we measure? In as many ways as there are things to measure. We measure in stacks and skeins and stories, a lovely word for a building s height that comes to us from Gothic cathedral builders who described the heights of their constructions by the number of stacked stained glass windows they installed. We measure horses by hands. We say pea-sized, dime-sized, walnut-sized and know what we’re talking about. We measure by Eiffel Towers, Statues of Liberty, football fields, London double-decker buses. We measure by Belgiums. We give ballpark estimates. Australians use the sydarb to indicate volume. One sydarb equals the amount of water in Sydney Harbor. We escape by a hairs breadth, we need wiggle room, we keep an arm’s length. A hair’s breadth is 0.1 millimeters. It takes 48 to make an inch. A beard-second is the length an average beard grows in a second: five nanometers. One nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. We measure in steps. A blink is 0.864 seconds to a wink’s 3,000 th5 of a microsecond, making a blink much slower than a wink.
We measure in steps. One step is thirty inches, though U.S. marching bands use a twenty-two-and-a-half-inch step—eight steps for every fiveyard line of a football field. A pace is the measure of a full stride from the position of a heel when it is raised from the ground to the point it is set down again. In Rome, it spanned five feet. A mile got its name from the Latin milliarium, the name for military stones erected every 1,000 paces along the Roman highways. The odometer was thought to have been invented by Archimedes during .the first Punic War. Chariots, whose wheels were four feet in diameter, turned four hundred times in one Roman mile. As the wheels turned, pebbles placed in a gear box were dropped one by one into another box, to be counted at journey’s end.
In ancient Mesopotamia, there were twelve counting systems. One was used for slaves, animals, fish, wooden objects, stone objects, and containers. Another was used to count dead animals; another for tallying amounts of cereal, bread, fish, milk; still another for wheat, another for rations, another for fields; still another to count barley, and still another, malt. Before the Statute of England in 1592 defined the mile as 5,280 feet, the Irish mile was 6,721 feet, the Scottish mile was 5,951 feet, and the London mile was eight furlongs, each furlong being 625 feet, for a total of 5,000 feet.
Making measures uniform has value, to be sure, particularly in a world now almost completely one global community, without its idiosyncratic differences, but is there the same poetry in nano macro micro byte as there is in a bale, a bundle, a ball, a baht? Perhaps. Nano macro micro byte is cute, but like all cute tilings, lacks depth. They are powers of ten and tell no other tale. A bale is ten reams of paper or a bundle of hay left in the field until needed. A bundle could also be forty quires or twenty hanks of yam or a package of shingles with which to roof a house; a ball is the measure for the degree of ice covering a polar sea; and a baht the weight of a silver coin in Thailand weighing 15 grams. There are stories in words that do not exist in numbers.
Metrology is a cold world and science itself seems bored by it. Physicists, it seems, like to name their discoveries with their human, not their scientific, natures. Reflecting the need to ground themselves in the real words, rather than abstract numbers, they talk in bams (1.0x10 to the minus 28 meters squared) and sheds (1.0x10 to the minus 24 bams) and outhouses (do you really want to know?), and shakes, the time it takes a lamb to shake its tail, which nuclear engineers have given as the name for ten nanoseconds. And it is how we got quark for the
most fundamental particles of the universe and the “flavors” they come in: up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom. Someone’s going to have to straighten this out all over again someday.
Quark was coined by its discoverer, Murray Gell-Mann, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1969, when he happened across it, in Finnegan’s Wake. In a letter dated June 27, 1978, he explained his epiphany. “I employed the sound quork for several weeks in 1963 before noticing “quark” in Finnegan’s Wake when the bartender calls, “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” Gell-Mann measured a quark as being smaller than 10 to the minus 19 in radius, but with no actual size and no actual internal structure. Joyce is famous for his linguistic brilliance, so where he got the word is anyone’s guess. It is a nineteenth-century word for what frogs and herons did before frogs croaked and herons cawed.
In the 1600s, a slug was a lump of metal shot from a cannon. Now it is the mass accelerated one foot per second per second by a force of one pound. Twelve slugs make a slinch, also call a mug, sometimes a snail.
How do you measure the coastline of Britain? The question was answered in 1960 by the Polish mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, and the answer was: infinite. At one time, man thought infinity was farther than we could see, then farther than we could sail, then fly, then farther than we could send a rocket ship, and now it is as far as a telescope in space transmitting radio signals from the beginning of the universe. We went so far beyond where we could see that we got to where we began. How did we do that? Where, in the intervening space or time, between then and now so that then and now can coexist in time, is what we for so long called infinity?
But what is infinity? Is it merely farther than we can go? Until we get there? The conundrum about infinity is that there is both the infinitely far and the infinitely small. It was Zeno who in 450 b.c. theorized that if any line can be divided, as any line can be, then you can never reach your goal because first you have to go halfway, then halfway to that point, and so on, ad infinitum. The coastline of Britain is infinite, for every bay has an infinite number of inlets and every inlet an infinite number of coves and every cove its numberless nooks and within each nook are countless crannies, and so on. It is an example of randomness existing within a defined structure and is measured with scale.
The universe was once so small you would have needed a microscope to find it. Then, in one ten-million-trillion-trillion-trillionths of a second, it was one hundred billion light-years across, a moment in time
and space coined as The Big Bang by Fred Hoyle in a 1949 radio bioadcast in which the announcer was describing a theory he thought was a lot of flooey. The Hubble telescope has found that instant; it occurred 13.7 billion years ago. The Hubble telescope has also shown us the alarming news that all the galaxies, stars, and planets togethei, what seem to us to exist in infinite space, comprise a mere 4 percent of the known matter and energy in the universe. The rest is dark eneigy and dark matter, meaning we don’t know what it is, only that it s up to no good, since it’s causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate.
What does it mean to wonder of a thing how far away or how small it is? To wonder about what we do not know is to be human. It is the way our minds work. Freud wondered what was going on inside us and discovered the unconscious; rather, he discovered that by dreams and jokes and slips of the tongue the unconscious could be measured; measured, it could be known. What is it we are not wondering about? When scientists began to wonder why cigarette smoke curls, flames flicker, traffic jams the way it does, or even why nature, which appears random and messy and cluttered, is beautiful, they invented Chaos, the theory that describes a universe “in which there is instability at eveiy point and in which small errors prove catastrophic over time.” What subscribes to the theory? Art, asteroids, bees, bell-shaped curve, blood vessels, ferns, fireflies, mosquitoes, measles, Morse Code, rain, rivers, epidemics, insomnia, war. The twentieth centuiy has been the centuiy of tremendous scientific breakthroughs, but the names the physicists seeking to discover the absolute truth about the observable universe have given their theories is not exactly reassuring that we are achieving progress. The more precise our measuring becomes, the more the theories sound otherwise: the theories of Relativity, of Incompleteness, of Indeterminacy, of Uncertainty, and now, of Chaos are the great breakthroughs of the twentieth centuiy.
When I was living in New York and meting my universe without the aid of mechanical devices, what I was doing was using physical reckoning. I was unconsciously, intuitively, and continually measuring, and I was as alive to the natural world and my place in it as if I were an Arctic hunter who knows exactly where he is, how far he is from home, and how long it will take him to get there. Whether one is crossing the tundra in caribou skins or pounding the pavement in four-inch heels, to measure is to make a personal connection to the perceived world. It is to literally meet the world—perhaps why mete is an old word for measure. While measuring, and mathematizing out measures in the
numbers we create in our minds that miraculously correlate with what we see, gives structure to our perceptions, perhaps it is not measuring’s answers that matter as much as the act of measuring itself, as the relationship between receiving and responding to the immediate world we’re in. To measure is to make a connection. To do it without a net is thrilling.