Inside the Miniature
Gergely Sülye
I was walking to the bus stop at the end of a school day. The Sun was high, but its rays were already getting orange and ripe, reflecting off of buildings or shining onto the grass on the field next to me, undisturbed. There was a building a bit ahead of me that caught my attention. It stood out because its featureless wall stared right at me, just at the right angle where I couldn’t see but that particular side. I had recently gotten into miniature building. It wasn’t anything big, not even a hobby, but as it comes to any other beginner I was good at distinguishing a good and a bad quality model. This house in front of me was awful. Something even a child would outperform if they had the chance. If you were to put this on your miniature landscape, then you certainly don’t have good taste. No, I don’t think you’d even have taste at all.
Thinking about landscapes, I looked around to see how severely this one building would ruin the surroundings. The field was beautiful, the huge water tower looking down on it filled me with a sense of security. What a shame, I thought. It was masterfully crafted. I could almost imagine myself admiring this scenery at some kind of exhibition. As I continued walking, I played around with the idea of comparing real-sized things to their miniature counterparts. Suddenly I was overcome with an odd sense of uneasiness. I looked at the featureless building again, now showing more of its walls at my current angle. It was in the distance now, being smaller than before. It looked just like a miniature. I looked back on the field. It was also far enough that I could barely see any specific details; the grass looked like a smooth green carpet. At this distance it really could have been made out of fabric for all I knew. Then I noticed the sky. There were no clouds, just a gradient which shifted from bright blue at the edges of the horizon, going gradually darker as it reached the darkish blue top of the sky. It was comparable to being in a big room, on a small miniature set. The further corners of the room appearing dark as they were so far, at least in the miniature’s proportions. I almost expected a big face to walk in from the big blueness and look down on me. But of course there was only space out there. The scale of proportions between the standard sizes and miniatures is nothing compared to the difference of scale of humans and the cosmos. Yet humans can shape both the miniature and large-scale worlds, with enough effort, that is. It’s only obvious, since only a lot of small details can make up something bigger. In terms of scales, there is always a smaller measurement, a building block. Even the featureless wall was made up of delicately placed bricks, measured amounts of cement, particles of paint and random specks of dust sticking to it. Of course this is not visible from far away, nor is it significant at our scale of the world.
Now thinking about abstract and faraway concepts, I made my way to the bus stop. The odd feeling I had was still so strange and new that I just had to go to the bottom of it. Having retreated into this rare state of meditation, I kept waiting at the stop, although no longer for my drive home, but for my answers. My bus paid no attention to me, just as I paid no mind to the bus. It slipped away in front of my nose and made its way further down the road, gradually becoming featureless as it eventually turned into a dot on the contrasting horizon of the blue sky and green carpet.
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