I bought a map for my office wall—one of these elegant, vintage National Geographic affairs with subtly colored political borders and topography in gray shadows. It is the Middle East as of 1978, that distant playground for American generals which, despite consistent efforts of the American people and their political leaders, continues to hold our weary attention. (And a strangely detached attention—it is curious that, despite so much money, blood, and thought spent on the region, so little of its culture has penetrated the United States. The Muslim world is as mysterious to Americans as it was on September 10, 2001.) Political borders have moved a bit since 1978, but less than you might guess; the Houthi-controlled territory in Yemen’s civil war is roughly coterminous with that of the pre-unification Republic of Yemen, while the internationally recognized Aden government occupies the footprint of the Soviet-backed People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. Mountains and cities, however, do not move. It is a fine map—a very fine map—and it was eight dollars.
A version of the same map appears in my family’s old National Geographic world atlas, which I spent inordinate time poring over as a child. It was already outdated then, with its big pink Soviet Union and little pink Yugoslavia, but this added to its attractiveness, I think. Here were traced the actions of adventure novels and private fantasies of conquest; there are still light pencil markings on the road maps of the American Southwest where I tried to work out the exact location of the Abbey of Saint Leibowitz. The blue cloth double folio resided conveniently in our magazine rack with the newspapers and glossies. George Bush is in Ulaanbaatar? Any mystery about that distant burg could be instantly dispelled.
The world I grew up in seemed so much larger than it is today. Even digital maps seemed to have more gravity. When Google Earth had its big break in 2003 (thanks to the network news coverage of the Iraq War, strangely enough), my late father downloaded the program and demonstrated it for the family. What a production it was—closing every other program to free enough memory that our top-of-the-line Dell wouldn’t crash, waiting for the globe to load, grunting in frustration at the jerkiness of the controls—just so you could look at our neighborhood’s back yards. (All the world at our fingertips, and this is the only thing I can remember us doing.)
Now most of what a layman would want, even street-level pictures, can be found swiftly and unfussily in the browser-based Google Maps—outside India, that is, where roads have uncertain names and directions come in gnomic predictions like “you will go left at the internet cafe” and “you will find a cow at the corner.” The world feels, for the most part, easy, accessible, and boring; your phone gives you precise directions, so you never have to know where you are or where you are going. The great, haunting question of the American Motor Age, Where does that highway go to?, is not only unanswered, but unasked. For the first time in world history, perhaps, it is possible to live entirely inside your head.
In the childhood library, though, there was more map than territory. The colorful Narnia of Pauline Baynes, the Hobbit’s Middle Earth with the sinister, long-nailed hand pointing east—fictional geographies received as much or more attention as the very real ’stans in the news. On my shelf still sits a very thoroughly loved copy of Karen Wynn Fonstad’s The Atlas of Middle Earth, with its speculative geologies and tectonic analyses. (Younger generations of Tolkienists seem to have lost this obsessive pseudo-scholarly streak, and instead turn themselves over to unwatchable hours of movies and television. The worst thing that can happen to your unattractive hobbies: going mainstream.) My grade-school notebooks were full of mountain chains with clustered, lambdate peaks and plausibly snaking rivers: imaginary geographies suggested, as often as not, by our back yard, a fractal collection of model worlds.
It is an indulgence, this map splayed on my office wall with thumbtacks like a monstrous, quadrilateral butterfly. I have been to some of these places, and know their hills and roads without looking; for the rest, I can fact-check locations on Google like anyone else. But is it not good to see, when you check the spelling of Sana’a, how many miles it is from Riyadh, and how many miles Riyadh is from Jerusalem? Is eight dollars so great a cost to remember how big the world is?
