Without a Traceroute

This is the Les Eclaireurs Lighthouse which stands watch over the Beagle Channel from a perch on the small Les Eclaireurs islands in the middle of the channel. According to the tour companies here in Ushuaia, it’s the “Lighthouse at the End of the World,” which isn’t really true. It’s not the southernmost lighthouse in the world, it doesn’t mark the end of the South American continent, it’s not even the actual lighthouse that features in the Jules Verne novel by that name.

What it is, is a symbol. Human beings are inherently symbol-seeking creatures. Our brains have evolved to pay careful attention to coincidence and causality. Loosely defined, a symbol is something that points to the presence or significance of something else. And doesn’t this lighthouse look really significant? Doesn’t it look like it should mark the uttermost edge of something?

And so, when the tour operators tell us that we’re going to see something important, we tourists play along. The lighthouse becomes important—significant—because enough people agree to pretend that it is. A similar effect occurs with currency. It becomes imbued with actual utility, as an exchange medium, as a biproduct of our collective acceptance that a scrap of paper with symbols printed on it is itself a symbol of value. The lighthouse becomes a symbol for geographic extremes, for endings, for people’s desire to stand on a precipice and peer over.

Or, in my case, it becomes a symbol of humankind’s easy acceptance of; our reliance on, a complex system of symbols that are essentially totally arbitrary. But that’s because I have tendency to overthink these things. It’s a pretty red lighthouse and makes a nice dramatic photo.