Footnotes on a life ill-lived #7.

³ See Coddon, “My Life in the Sky of Myself”: It is possible to be simultaneously as vast as a galaxy and as shallow as a puddle. This is to do, in part, with self-loathing, but it is just as much about scale — because a galaxy is to the universe as an atom is to the body of a hippopotamus, and somewhere in every puddle is a subatomic particle that never imagined anything so huge as a few quarts of water. And so one can see, or at least the author hopes one can, that it is possible to feel simultaneously liberated by insignificance and crushed by being all that there is, was, or ever could be.