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The Joy of a Ceiling (On Space)

  • Writer: Aidan J
    Aidan J
  • Sep 1, 2018
  • 5 min read

I lie in the dining room, watching the blank ceiling. The blank beige suffers no interruptions. The ceiling remains monotonous, in the most beautiful way possible. Without the boring ceiling, no one would appreciate the creation of indoor space.


Every inch of the ceiling strains not to collapse upon itself. The ceiling holds itself together to enclose the room, so the harsh elements outside cannot threaten us (like the terrible mosquito). We hide insulation in its recesses, because where else would the ugly go in a house? Certainly not on the decorated walls or on the comfortable floor. We create the permanent, climate-controlled space, untouched by the passage of time and environmental hazards, all thanks to the unassuming ceiling.


The self-conscious ceiling grants us the feeling of grandeur through its inflection. Vaulted ceilings let our minds idle while our vision dawdles over the long beams of sight. Huge concert halls let music ring thanks to the grace of lofty ceilings. However, claustrophobic we are in the domain of the Lilliputians. Trapped in a casket, sleeping in a car, hiding in a closet, these are all ways no one wants to live. Yet why do we prefer the mansion to the humble bungalow? With fear comes fantasy, and the fantasy gives comfort. The tiniest of space does just as much of the largest of space, whether it is better or worse.

The Sistine chapel seems to extend up into the heavens, depicting the cosmic Christian history. Without the ceiling, the bastion of Christianity would only shrink in magnificence to the scale of the blind, enormous universe. Religion would not mean the world; religion would be part of the world and lose its scope to the vast void.


I'm done with this.

No one cares about ceilings. I certainly don’t—maybe there are some architects that do. What I wrote above was inspired by extreme tiredness after completing a Physics take-home test. Even though I was tired, I still think that it’s interesting that I fixated so much on the idea of space. There’s something peculiar in our orientation in the world; many people suffer from out-of-body experiences, we move slower walking with our eyes closed. Perhaps the biggest wonder is why Americans use time to measure distances.


“It’s a forty-minute drive to go to the restaurant. Is there some place closer we can go instead?” With the invention of vehicles, we care more about how much time out of our day the travel will take than the distance. This is simple, I have twenty-four hours in a day, and I need to budget them. I never get that time back. Cars allow us to travel distance easily, and so it’s not really my concern; however, I WOULD ask for the distance if I was running low on gas. The consequence of this transportation is the destruction of the spatial barrier. I can visit my family living on the other side of the country for a weekend; if I lived in the early 19th century, that same trek would take me years.


This is the Lewis and Clark expedition trail. It took two years for two people to go one way across the country, and that is not even including the Rockies.

Since there is no longer a distance stopping our travel, we now feel free to explore and inhabit any region of the world, carrying what was once unique to our home. Portland and Seattle probably feel very similar. New York City and Paris both are dense urban environments that hold a lot of cultural value with huge business opportunities and a poverty problem. One happens to speak English, the other French. In what American city can you not order Mexican, Indian, and Chinese food?


Our perception of space masks over the absolute space between places. When I first learned to drive, I hesitated to even go through parking lots at idle speed. I was moving faster than walking, and it was way more than I could handle. Over a period of a month, I learned to drive on the freeway, and suddenly, the same streets that I use to comfortably walk down now felt too slow to walk on. The distance in space, the length of houses, were murdered in my mind. I could no longer appreciate my walks in my neighborhood; now, the streets were the entrance to the extensive network of roads in the city.

Now I go ZOOM ZOOM!

There are some other nuances to this psychological perception of space. Revisiting your childhood home will remind you of the true simpleton you were. More pertinently, it reminds you how tiny you were, as the table that once towered over you will now function as a place to forget your water glass. Not only does our perception of size change with our own size, but our reality, the drifting Milky Way galaxy containing our solar system with the earth’s rotation and revolution around the sun, never makes its way into our life. While laying in my bed, sleeping, I am travelling very quickly through space. As a result, there’s a gap between the space our fingers occupy and the space relating to some fixed location in between galaxies.


The universe is expanding. Is that location constant? What does the universe expand into? A mysterious ether-goo in a multiverse?


I don’t know. The nature of space in this context is still being studied today by physicists, but I have heard that everything in the universe is accelerating away from everything else. Almost like a balloon. Blowing up a balloon increases the space between any two points on the surface of the balloon. The balloon takes up more space. Applying that to the universe, space would constantly expand or self-replicate, so that the amount of space between any two points is constantly increasing. Relatively, space would stay the same. Absolutely, everything would spread apart, including from each other.


Of course, I'm the one who came up with the balloon analogy. Coincidentally, other people did too.

What I’ve been trying to prove is that space is as much a function of our psyche as time. This nebulous space, something that we cannot directly see, changes all the time, and perhaps will never be the same way again, just like with time. Despite our many convoluted theories about time, we refuse to care about space, and so it forms into this type of naught, this vacuum, that we perceive in our daily lives.


How does acknowledging this change our lives at all?


I believe it allows us to select what kind of format we wish to express ourselves with, what kind of media we entertain ourselves with. The best paintings use an instance of both time and space to express a consistency between the two. The best literature neglects space in favor of time to explore the continuum of observation in time. The best movies capture events in space and time to immerse ourselves into a different psychology. The best video games create a space that a person can explore for any amount of time they please. Any perturbation of this order is a deliberate device to express some deeper meaning, and so this becomes a helpful guide as to how to analyze various forms of media.


I know I haven't posted in a while, even though I've made it my schedule to post once a week every Tuesday. Anymore, it's either going to be when a topic comes to me, or at the start of the month on a Sunday. Sorry for the lack of a schedule, but at least now you have a reason to get e-mail notifications!


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