I'm on my back staring at the cold, sharp night sky on top of a hill. I'm not in this position of recline through choice: Bad decision making in regard to the lingering compacted snow at the top of Shooters Hill and unorthodox (and violent) dismounting of my beloved bicycle has given me time to consider the pristine heaven that would normally be processed as a background so empty of threat, so devoid of impact, that it fades into nothing while I ride.
After a few minutes, when the throbbing in my legs and back stop and I've managed to inconvenience an acceptable number of motorists, I decide to right myself and after the various parts of my conscience have had a good talk about it, we decide it's best to continue on foot. With my pedal cages clanking on the ground due to my slightly too-small wheels, I have no choice but to sling the bicycle over my shoulder and traipse across the heath to my home.
At this time of night, the heath is deserted. The temperature is below freezing, but I can't feel it. My lower body is still numb and my arms are warm from the effort of carrying my steel load. A friend once commented that she was amused by the relationship my bicycle and I have:
'Sometimes you ride it. Sometimes it rides you.'
With my attention now open and wondering, I take in the land that I cross first thing every morning and last thing every night. The snow is powder despite the feet that must have flocked here at the first word of it. The heath is deceptively large, and not even those thousands can destroy that desert of cold, white sand.
Briefly looking up to the village at the bottom of the heath I think back to what I once read about the 15th century polymath Nicholas of Kues, a man to whom no pefect sphere could exist and to whom every straight line was simply the imperceptible arc of an infinite and inconceivable circle. Here, at this moment, with the light from the lamps swimming across the tracks in the snow and bathing in the untouched patches, I can see the curvature of the land.
The light slithers from the edges of the heath and bounds across the plain, surfing on the sheer white snow, leaping to the distant boundary to struggle against the dense, callous black of the far horizon. It acts as a sheet that traces the outline of the world it rests on.
It describes for me a perfect, sweeping, pristine white arc. It extends from the edges of my vision, sweeping across the distant hills, hills that it carefully edits into blackness on its smooth incline. It cruises under the street lamps and darts in front of the old townhouses that straddle the heath. It slows toward the centre, exactly cutting through the whole of Blackheath Village itself before meeting at the lighted point of the church with it's famous 'Devil's Toothpick' spire. This is the arc that the polymath wrote of. I wonder at the infinite circle it describes, a circle that casually and unseen rips through the heart of the land. Unnoticed and undisturbed, it is a circle that sweeps out from this very point, further than any of us is ever going to see or know, it touches parts of the universe that rest in the most uncharted of theory.
The first cosmologists believed that the universe was an infinite sphere with the world at the edge and in the middle and nothing in between. This was the edge of that sphere, the fine line upon which the world resides, balanced on the precipice between all and nothing, the very universe and the perfect vacuum. For a moment my heart places me above the sphere as my mind struggles to grasp that on that celestial arc, no matter how closely one could look, that impeccable and ineffable curvature is never lost.
I realise my feet are wet, I only wear canvas shoes these days, and they won't stand up to the fine and treacherous powder around me. I realise that I'm now shaking from cold. I realise that my shoulder hurts from the hard steel digging into it. I realise that I need to get to the shop before it closes. I realise that I received a message and my phone has been buzzing away in my pocket for about ten minutes.
I try and grasp the arc again, try to block out the distractions of the world on the edge of that perfect curve. It's too late, I've lost it, the arc is gone, resuming the irregular, imperfect, flawed and human jagged edge that was built here an eternity after the template was shaped.
I make my way to the road, the sheer black that cuts through the arc and delicately get on my bicycle and, with no ceremony of beginning, start to pedal down the hill. There's simply no point in looking over my shoulder to check for cars, or stopping at red lights, or being wary of junctions, roundabouts and pedestrians. With the lingering geometry of that curve still fresh in my mind I realise that the sphere doesn't care for such obscure, man-made maths.
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