Size and Scale

Coming back and forth between Israel and the US has made me thing about size and scale.  One of the first things I noticed coming back to Arizona was the overall scale of things.  The rooms are very big, the ceilings are very high, the streets are very wide, the distances are very long, etc.  

I think what stood out first was the incredibly high ceilings in some of the houses in AZ.  You couldn’t even reach them with a normal step stool.  You’d need large, heavy duty outdoor type ladder  just to change a lightbulb. I get the concept of high ceilings.  If the ceiling is too low then you can see it in your peripheral vision.  Its always there and seems confining, even claustrophobic.  If you raise it up a bit higher so that its just outside of your peripheral vision then your’e not aware of it in your immediate surroundings.  I’m not an interior design specialist or an architect, but I imagine that there is some point of diminishing returns, so to speak. Some point beyond which you just don’t get much more bang for your buck as far as raising the ceiling goes.  The first couple of feet might make a big difference in the overall feel of the room, but once you get beyond 9 or 10 feet it no longer feels any less crowded than it did before.  It just gets harder to deal with because you can’t even change the light bulbs without a huge hassle, and the volume of air you need to cool or heat goes up dramatically.

The houses in Israel are indeed smaller.  But that’s just it.  They don’t really feel smaller.  Even the apartment we are renting feels big and airy.  Its just the right proportion to not feel crowded but to not be unwieldy.  

Interestingly, I noticed the same thing in the outdoors.  We were camping in the Carmel Mountains, and we spent some time in the Rockies at the beginning of this trip to the US.  Both are beatiful mountain ranges, but the Rocky Mountains are clearly larger than the the Carmel Mountains in Israel.  And yet, when you’re in the middle of them, the view is actually not that different.  In both cases you can see the valley below, the ridgline across the valley and the next few mountains in the hazy distance.  The fact that the Rockys go on for hundreds of miles is interesting and adds to the abstract immenseness of it, but is not there in your immediate presence.  The proportions are just too big for your human brain to deal with.  The Carmel Mountains are much smaller, but are not so small that you can see all the way across them.  You can still get lost in them, still find places where they seem larger than life, more vast than you can see or imagine.  The proportion is still right for the human mind.  If you could take the Carmel Mountains and make them bigger, longer, wider, you just wouldn’t get much more bang for your buck, at least from the perspective of a single human being standing in the middle of them. I suppose you could accommodate a lot more people at the same time in different areas if they were bigger, but from the perspective of just me myself, it wouldn’t really matter much.  (Now the Rockies are taller, going up above the timberline into those jagged snow capped peaks, and the Carmel Mountains don’t have that.  But Mount Hermon does….)

Even the ocean tells a similar story. Both the atlantic and the pacific, the two great American oceans, are much more vast than the Mediterranean, Israel’s “small ocean.”  But again, standing on the beach in the surf, you can’t really tell the difference.  The much larger size is completely lost on my tiny human brain and eyes.  I just can’t tell the difference. The proportions of the Israeli little ocean are just right.  Its just big enough to be bigger than I can imagine, without going overboard.  

It really is amazing that Israel has managed to pack so much into its little self, at such an optimally human scale.  Yes, other countries and places are bigger.  But it seems to me that Israel just happens to be pretty well proportioned to the human body, to the human mind and to the human consciousness. 

I know this may just be the size version of culture shock – that people are always coming back from Israel, or Europe, to American and being shocked at how big everything seems.  And I get that.  I certainly never thought about it before I went to Israel.  But my take on this culture shock of size is to realize that its not just that things in Israel are cute and small, and things in the US are grown-up and big.  Its rather to be aware that perhaps the smallness of Israel isn’t actually smallness at all. Perhaps its just correctly proportioned to the human being – that the extra bigness we have in the US is cool and may be necessary to accommodate the larger population, but beyond that, and from the individual human perspective, it just may not be necessary.