Louis Schwartzberg has done it again. In a seven minute trailer for his upcoming 3-D documentary
Mysteries of
the Unseen World he shows us what is too big, too small, too fast and too slow for us to see unassisted. An owl's pumping wings in flight, a butterfly's egg, the cloud systems over the earth, and the growth of a mushroom all escape our observation because we live in an absurdly narrow sliver of time and space. But using time lapse photography, and powerful microscopes we too can witness marvelous corners of nature.
The spider's web, which rivals steel in
strength, yet is completely flexible, is a hundred times more slender than a human hair. Louis takes us into that microscopic world, where we can muse whether such grit can possibly be ours as well.
Marriage whizzes too fast, at least when it is not inching by at a snail's pace. The incremental changes seem too minute, the obstacles depressingly huge. But we can only see what we can see, and it is easy to be duped that our vantage point is somehow inclusive or
even accurate. Watching Louis's images cracks that illusion wide open.
Recently my aunt told me that her brother, my uncle, had found a box of love letters. His marriage was strained to the breaking point in the years before his wife died, and at times he felt like he was dangling in space. His wife was bed ridden, depressed, and suffered from addiction. But when he opened the box of yellowed paper, penned sixty years before, it was as if he could see a lifetime
compressed into a few moments. He felt transported to when their relationship had been affectionate, happy and vibrant. Suddenly he saw the bigger picture, in which the angst of disease shrank to a microscopic size.
I wonder what my strife will look like when I can watch it from a star, or in a seven minute clip.
