極私的名文案内

We are from Down Under, and we have come Up Over the Equator―that purely imaginary line around the terrestrial globe’s girth. All these Up Over folks in the Northern Hemisphere believe that they are on top of the world; but it is only a mental habit, an illusion they have fallen into. A ball spinning in space has neither top nor bottom, but is up and over with every spin.

Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, and South Americans would be geographically justified in considering the South Pole the top of the world―and in viewing Europe, Asia, and North America as Down Under.

Human beings are such infinitesimal microbes on the vast skin of the spinning earth! So small and insignificant are we that the curvature of our spheroid planet is imperceptible to our normal vision and experience. Only by the teachings of geographers and navigators do we know that the world is not flat. It looks flat to its surface-dwellers everywhere. But the map-makers depict the world on an infinitely small scale, with their purely imaginary lines of longitude and latitude, naming the longest line of latitude “the Equator”. Then, by caprice, they show the North Pole at the top of the map, and the South Pole at the bottom.

This is only a conventional diagram, in two dimensions, which does not correspond to the reality of the three-dimensional globe spinning in space, its-movement constituting a fourth dimension, which cannot be represented in any still-life diagram.

Yet, because of these inadequate geographers’ diagrams, the peoples who live in countries marked on maps as north of the Equator have an Up Over complex, and consider that we of the Southern Hemisphere are upside-down acrobats!

No harm is done by these diagrammatic delusions: but I always think it slightly funny when people from Northern Hemisphere countries introduce me to their pals as a Man from Down Under, as though I’d come up, like a painter on a ladder, or a possum on a drain-pipe, to stroll around on a roof.

オーストラリアの作家Frank Clune(1893年生まれ)が、当時長い時間をかけシドニーからホノルルに辿り着いた際につづった文章(Hands across the Pacificより)。オーストラリアに限らず、南半球に住んでいる人が日常的に感じているにちがいない小さな「違和」の感覚を抜群のユーモアにくるんで表しているようにみえる。宇宙から見た地球は絶対無敵ぃぃ~!