Horizon

I was looking at the horizon for a long time and had to question how I would see it without knowledge of the spherical earth. The paradox I see is this: the horizon is the marker for where we cannot see any more, but we can't see 'nothing.' It is the visible non-visible. This is an important phenomenon for the development of the human mind. In the spherical model we tell ourselves we see the atmosphere as it overshoots and wraps around the solid world, the sea disappearing by virtue of its curvature. Yet as it appears in human phenomenology this is a line, not a curve, and looking out to sea or across vast fields it is one of the flattest naturally occurring lines. (Seriously, where else in nature would we find something approximating not only the flatness of the line but its geometric being as an indefinite series of contiguous points). Where two discrete elements meet we cease to see, and so conceive of their difference in a specific situation of the visible non-visible. Looking past this, however, without a knowledge of outer space, there is a re-circling of the elements as they continue their trajectories past the border of the failure of sight.