har-ish

While reading Umberto Eco’s The Island of the Day Before, I found myself wondering how medieval Europe imagined the world beyond its known shores. What lay beyond the edges of their maps? Strange kingdoms, mythical creatures, distant peoples, impossible islandsvor perhaps the legendary realm of Prester John? A mappa mundi was not merely a map of geography; it was also a map of what people believed, feared, imagined and hoped existed beyond the limits of what they knew.
What fascinates me most are those blank spaces. They weren’t really empty; they were invitations to imagine. I felt something similar while reading Eco. There were large sections of the book I didn’t fully understand, yet his narration and the intrigue of the story kept pulling me onward. Perhaps I didn’t need to comprehend every layer. Some mysteries are more pleasurable when they remain mysteries.
This doodle is my little mappa mundi of that feeling: somewhere between the known and the imagined, between history and myth, with a few deliciously unexplored territories left blank.