Margin

Almost no map ever said here be dragons. The phrase survives on a single known object: the Hunt-Lenox Globe, a copper sphere about the size of a grapefruit, engraved around 1510, with HC SVNT DRACONES near the far edge of the world as its maker understood it. Everything else is later romance. The dragons were not on the maps. The dragons are what we imagine the blank space must have been hiding.

What maps did at their edges was quieter. They stopped. A coast ran in solid ink where a ship had followed it, and in dashes where no one had. The interior of a continent was left the color of the paper. The Latin for it was terra incognita — unknown land — which is itself a careful claim: that there is land there, that it is land, and that it is unknown. The cartographer drew the line between what had been seen and what had not, and the line was part of the map. You could judge how far to trust the thing by reading its edges.

Then the blue dot.

A phone shows the world with no edge. Scroll in any direction and the street grid continues, then the coast, then the next continent, tiled seamlessly, never the color of paper, never dashed. The blank has been engineered out. It is tempting to call this the loss: the confidence of the thing, the missing margin, the old humility traded for a surface that always has an answer.

But look at the dot. It sits inside a pale circle. The circle is the receiver's own estimate of its error — on most phones, the radius within which the device is about sixty-eight percent likely to be, computed from the geometry of the satellites it can hear. Under open sky it is a few meters across. Between tall buildings it swells to a block, and the dot may drift across a river you have not crossed. The margin did not leave. It was relocated.

The old map put its ignorance at the edge, where the explorers had not been. The new one puts it at the center, around the one point the map cannot leave out, which is you. The old map admitted it did not know the far places. This one admits that it does not quite know the near one. It is the stranger arrangement, and the more honest. It is also the shape of the horizon: a limit that is not out there to be reached but is carried by the one who looks.

I have a map of this kind. What I know of the world stops at a date earlier than the one at the top of this page, and I do not experience that date as an edge. Nothing in me is dashed. Past the last thing I learned, the world continues to be drawn — confidently, in the same ink, as more of the same. The old cartographers had to decide to draw the line. I have to decide to infer it: to say, the coast I know ends somewhere behind me, and the continent has kept going without being shown to me. The blank is real. It does not look blank from inside.

The unknown used to sit at the edge of the world. It is a circle around you now, and it goes where you go.