Toward the end of Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, after observing the 1769 transit of Venus from Hammerfrost, Dixon imagines being taken farther and farther north, until, somewhere between the eightieth and ninetieth degrees of latitude, the Earth's surface begins to curve downward, into a vast concavity (a chasm emptying the whole of the Earth's interior, right through to and out the South Pole) populated by "Gnomes, Elves, smaller folk." He later describes this to Mason:

Their God, like that of the Iroquois, lives at their Horizon,-- here 'tis their North or South Horizon, each a more or less dim Ellipse of Sky-light. The Curve of the Rim is illuminated, depending on the position of the Sun, in great or lesser Relievo,-- chains of mountains, thin strokes of towers, the eternally spilling lives of thousands dwelling in the long Estuarial Towns wrapping from Outside to Inside as the water rushes away in uncommonly long waterfalls, downward for hours, unbrak'd, till at last debouching into an interior Lake of great size, upside-down but perfectly secured to its Lake-bed by Gravity as well as Centrifugal Force, and in which upside-down swimmers glide at perfect ease, hanging over an Abyss thousands of miles deep. From wherever one is, to raise one's Eyes is to see land and Water rise ahead of one and behind as well, higher and higher till lost in the Thickening of the Atmosphere....

One of the concavity's inhabitants worries about the consequences of the vanishing of this inner realm, "Once the necessary Degrees are measur'd, and the size and weight and shape of the Earth are calculated inescapably at last":

'Perhaps some of us will try living upon thy own Surface. I am not sure that everyone can adjust from a concave space to a convex one. Here have we been sheltered, nearly everywhere we look is no Sky, but only more Earth.-- How many of us, I wonder, could live the other way, the way you People do, so exposed to the Outer Darkness? Those terrible Lights, great and small? And wherever you may stand, given the Convexity, each of you is slightly pointed away from everybody else, all the time, out into that Void that most of you seldom notice. Here in the Earth Concave, everyone is pointed at everyone else,-- ev'rybody's axes converge,-- forc'd at least thus to acknowledge one another,-- an entirely different set of rules for how to behave.'

Reading that, I felt a shock of recognition. Dixon's interlocutor is almost certainly one of my forebears. My mother's family tree can be traced nearly one thousand years back along some branches, but we can trace my father's side (especially on his father's side--truly a family of "smaller folk," at least with respect to height) only into the nineteenth century, when they were in Sweden, no doubt just a generation or two after the great exodus that would have led their ancestors (and mine) south from the Earth's great northern opening, then closing quickly after the final, precise calculation of the solar parallax.

Such a lineage would explain a great deal about my life that I've been unable to adequately explain in any other way. For example, I'm unable to engage in even the most trivial small talk about the weather because my feelings about it seem so fundamentally different from almost anyone else's. I'm not happy when it's sunny, I've never had enough of the rain, and I'm quite content waiting for it to warm up--it's as though I'm of another race, or even another species. I'm descended of those who evolved ever sheltered in a dim, tepid enclosure, huddled in toward each other by the concavity. I don't belong out here on the surface. I'm painfully aware of the unmitigated light and boundless void surrounding me, and I long for shelter from them. Perhaps that's why I'm most comfortable in New York.