infinity

Perhaps it's an effect of recent reading, but last night I had a dream which used to often come to me when I was a teenager. I haven't dreamed it in years since then.

In my dream, I'm trying to place the infinitely big next to the infinitely small. Usually this proves impossible to visualize and I wake up suddenly with a feeling of dread. My waking is like a thunderclap: I remember one time when it seemed like something had burst into my room with a loud shout. It was as if I'd been thrown out of the dream for daring to approach something too holy to gaze upon.

In last night's dream, however, I wasn't trying to put the infinitely small next to the infinitely large. Rather, I imagined it within the large, so that no matter how far I "zoomed" in or out, the smaller was always embraced by the large.

Just as there is no center on a line that extends to infinity, so there is no central, privileged or default "zoom level."

But you could also say that every point on the line is a center, and every "zoom level" is privileged.