Imaginary Lines When I’m playful I use the meridians of longitude and parallels of latitude for a seine, drag the Atlantic Ocean for whales. —MARK TWAIN, Life on the Mississippi 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.
