Credit: The Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/08/the-quirks-of-smallness/379261/)1
Some things are made to make you feel small on purpose. Others are merely larger than you, and were never obligated to notice you at all. The human experience – real and fictional – is meant to build a whole self in an attempt to master a world that will never hold still for it. I write about the moment that mastery fails: when a scientist’s knowledge outpaces his conscience, when an empire’s certainty meets unburied history, when a frontier, a family, or a self starts closing in. I look for it in nineteenth-century Gothic novels and in prestige television, in colonial archives and in the ever-growing digital realm of games and the like — anywhere a story asks what’s left of a person once the world stops agreeing to be small enough to hold.
SMALLNESS 