Fabrication : Essays on making things and making meaning - Softcover

It's made in two hemispheres, and in the shape of a flower.

Each hemisphere is drawn with twelve petals. The ocean is the color of the sky, the lettering is black, and the continents are shades of green and orange and purple. The rosettes are broken in odd places. A tip of New South Wales floats with New Zealand. Half of Zimbabwe floats with Madagascar. The Galapagos islands are cut in two and there's an entire blue petal with nothing but the South Atlantic Ocean. Look at your globe closely, and you'll see how it's printed on paper in the shape of orange slices.

The world is made in 9 and 12 and 16 inches. The world is made in blue and antique. The world is made in paper and in plastic. The world is made in standard shades and in colors like kiwi and in inks like cobalt and gold that look expensive for those places that need to be filled with conservative, expensive-looking globes. The world can talk, the world can be flat or bumpy. The world can be lit from without or within.

And here's the painful truth. We don't want to hear this any more than flat-earthers wanted to hear the world is round.

The truth is this: the world is made on an assembly line.

. . . And why is the world still made like this when all the maps you need are on computer programs? In addition to the globes, there are over 10,000 maps in stacks against the wall or being rolled and cut on tables. Political maps, physical maps, history maps. A map of the Colonial Possessions of World Powers in 1914. Another of Europe in 1648, still another showing voyages and discoveries to 1610, and another western land claims and the ordinance of 1787. Why all these anachronistic objects? Why are all these people working? Why the postal service shipping these boxes? Why is all this necessary?

I know that answer to that one, my daughter says. It's because, she says, they're pretty things. And when someone is talking with real children in a class and someone asks where is Romania, the teacher can take minutes to go to the computer and call something upon the screen or she can pull a map down from the ceiling or send the globe on one more rotation around the classroom, passed hand to hand, right there.

And it only takes a split second. And your hand might brush against your teacher's hand, or your best friend's, or some boy you like. It's the same way it is, she says, when you pass those plates of glass cups at church.

I run my hand across a globe. You feel the body of the earth when you do this. You feel the roll of mountains, the smooth surface of plateaus. You feel the ocean. You sense the children who have gone before you. You think of the mysteries of travel and return. You think of gravity. Your body remembers a particular basketball and hoop, a particular car trip to Florida, the love that binds you to one place and not another one. And through that one place, if you love it deeply, to every other place there is, to every possibility.

Everything you need to know, my daughter says, the answer to every single question you could think to ask your teachers. For that one moment, you can sense the answers. For that one moment only, it's right there in your hand.