So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite 'em, And so proceed ad infinitum.
Jonathan Swift, extract from On Poetry: A Rhapsody (1733)
The popular notion that stories about people changing size are aimed at children is an odd one when you look at it with an adult eye. I find it impossible, for example, to think of the hero of Gulliver’s Travels, pinned to the ground by a thousand tiny arrows, without also recalling that the author Jonathan Swift is said to have had Meniere’s Disease – a kind of vertigo which can lead to collapses, as if suddenly defeated by the smallest of everyday things. In this way, a rapid change of scale can be seen as a metaphor for something that brings us ‘down to size’, such as an embarrassing heath condition, a change in social status, or a shift in perspective.
In Glenn Gould’s experimental radio documentary The Idea of North (PBS, 1967), regular commuters on a long distance train journey to the far north of Canada talk about their relationship to the remote landscape. Conversations and voices overlap, fading in and out with the clattering of the train wheels and the sympathetic rattle of the catering trolley creating a dreamlike, almost hypnotic effect...
