"Once on a Wednesday excursion when I was a little girl,
my father bought me a beaded wire ball that I loved. At a touch, I could
collapse the toy into a flat coil between my palms, or pop it open to make a
hollow sphere. Rounded out, it resembled a tiny Earth, because its hinged
wires traced the same pattern of intersecting circles that I had seen on the
globe in my schoolroom-the thin black lines of latitude and longitude. The few
colored beads slid along the wire paths haphazardly, like ships on the high
seas."
"My father strode up Fifth Avenue to Rockefeller Center
with me on his shoulders, and we stopped to stare at the statue of Atlas,
carrying Heaven and Earth on his."
"The bronze orb that Atlas held aloft, like the wire toy
in my hands, was a see-through world, defined by imaginary lines. The Equator.
The Ecliptic. The Tropic of Cancer. The Tropic of Capricorn. The Arctic
Circle. The prime meridian. Even then I could recognize, in the graph-paper
grid imposed on the globe, a powerful symbol of all the real lands and waters
on the planet."