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The Horizon Line

2016-07-05 · letter vlog · John · 2:50 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Philosophy & meaning (also: Personal life, Pop culture) · mode: Personal essay · tags: recurring series, on location

On vacation by a Great Lake in Michigan, John reflects on the horizon: once he thought life meant chasing it and saw his return to Indianapolis, the city his father fled, as failure; now he is content to watch it from the middle and thinks he underrated happiness and observing.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Vacation in Michigan; the lake and horizon; childhood wondering about sailing to the horizon

  • ★★ On vacation in Michigan, John reads, writes, spends time with family and stares at a Great Lake that looks like an ocean stretching to the horizon. — 00:00:01
  • ★★ John loves a good horizon line; as a kid he wondered what would happen if you sailed to it, since the world looked as if it ended there. — 00:00:12
  • ★★ Older, John realized you could chase the horizon forever and never reach it, which gave him a comfort he finds hard to describe. — 00:00:25

00:00:34 — Hiroshi Sugimoto's Seascapes and the comfort of a water horizon

  • ★★ One of John's favourite artists is Hiroshi Sugimoto, whose Seascapes series photographs water horizons around the world, from the Tasman Sea to Lake Superior. — 00:00:34
  • ★★ Sugimoto has said water and air vouchsafe our existence; John suggests that may be the comfort he feels at a water horizon. (hedged) — 00:00:48

00:00:58 — The edgeless world; Dad leaves Indianapolis; John ends up back there in 2007

  • ★★★ Now the horizon makes John think not of the world's edge but its edgelessness; he cites Terry Pratchett: the farther you sail, the closer to home you are. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ Their dad grew up in Indianapolis when it was nicknamed Naptown because nothing happened there, a place for people wanting quiet lives in America's flat, unbeautiful middle. — 00:01:09 · Mike Green, Indianapolis
  • ★ John says it was the kind of place Nick Carraway could retreat to at the end of The Great Gatsby. — 00:01:20 · New York City
  • ★★ Their dad worked hard to get out of Indianapolis; he and Mom left for good a few weeks after John was born and never looked back. — 00:01:27 · Mike Green, Sydney Green, Indianapolis
  • ★★★ In 2007, living in New York, John called Dad to say Sarah had a job in Indianapolis; Dad said, 'You can't be serious.' — 00:01:33 · Sarah Urist Green, Mike Green, New York City, Indianapolis
  • ★★ John sailed from a birthplace he never knew to Orlando, Birmingham, Chicago and New York, and ended up back where he started. — 00:01:45 · Chicago (city), New York City, Indianapolis
  • ★★ John used to think of ending up back in the middle as a failure. — 00:01:53

00:01:56 — The Third Coast; once chasing the horizon, Ahab as hero; now content in the middle; sign-off

  • ★★ Midwesterners call the Great Lakes the Third Coast or brag of an unsalted, sharkless sea, but know their lakes are not as grand as the coastal oceans. — 00:01:56
  • ★★★ John felt he had failed because he was not looking at the greatest horizon, swimming the strongest current or battling the biggest waves. — 00:02:06
  • ★★★ John used to think you had to keep chasing the unreachable horizon your whole life, that this was the point of life. — 00:02:13
  • ★★ John used to think Moby-Dick's Captain Ahab, who loses everything chasing the white whale, was the only proper hero in American fiction. — 00:02:21

  • ★★★ Now John is utterly content to look at the horizon rather than chase it: he likes the middle and is happy at this lake. — 00:02:28

    “I find myself content, utterly content, to look at the horizon rather than chase after it.”

  • ★★★ John thinks he has underrated happiness and the pleasure of just observing. (hedged) — 00:02:40

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: Indianapolis

Also: People: Hiroshi Sugimoto · Mike Green · Sarah Urist Green · Sydney Green · Terry Pratchett

Works: Moby-Dick · Seascapes · The Great Gatsby

Places: Baltic Sea · Birmingham, Alabama · Caribbean · Chicago (city) · Great Lakes · Lake Superior · Mediterranean Sea · Michigan · Midwestern United States · New York City · Orlando, Florida · Sea of Japan · Tasman Sea

Characters: Captain Ahab · Nick Carraway

Only in the description or credits: Thoughts from Places

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