[Off-Schedule] Novelty, Mystery, and Beauty in the New Year
Quotes and Comments
How many ways can you shuffle a deck of cards? 52!, also known as:
80658175170943878571660636856403766975289505440883277824000000000000
What does this mean? Uh, this, I suppose:
Start by picking your favorite spot on the equator. You're going to walk around the world along the equator, but take a very leisurely pace of one step every billion years. The equatorial circumference of the Earth is 40,075,017 meters. Make sure to pack a deck of playing cards, so you can get in a few trillion hands of solitaire between steps. After you complete your round the world trip, remove one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean. Now do the same thing again: walk around the world at one billion years per step, removing one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean each time you circle the globe. The Pacific Ocean contains 707.6 million cubic kilometers of water. Continue until the ocean is empty. When it is, take one sheet of paper and place it flat on the ground. Now, fill the ocean back up and start the entire process all over again, adding a sheet of paper to the stack each time you’ve emptied the ocean.
Do this until the stack of paper reaches from the Earth to the Sun. Take a glance at the timer, you will see that the three left-most digits haven’t even changed. You still have 8.063e67 more seconds to go. 1 Astronomical Unit, the distance from the Earth to the Sun, is defined as 149,597,870.691 kilometers. So, take the stack of papers down and do it all over again. One thousand times more. Unfortunately, that still won’t do it. There are still more than 5.385e67 seconds remaining. You’re just about a third of the way done.
And you thought Sunday afternoons were boring
To pass the remaining time, start shuffling your deck of cards. Every billion years deal yourself a 5-card poker hand. Each time you get a royal flush, buy yourself a lottery ticket. A royal flush occurs in one out of every 649,740 hands. If that ticket wins the jackpot, throw a grain of sand into the Grand Canyon. Keep going and when you’ve filled up the canyon with sand, remove one ounce of rock from Mt. Everest. Now empty the canyon and start all over again. When you’ve levelled Mt. Everest, look at the timer, you still have 5.364e67 seconds remaining. Mt. Everest weighs about 357 trillion pounds. You barely made a dent. If you were to repeat this 255 times, you would still be looking at 3.024e64 seconds. The timer would finally reach zero sometime during your 256th attempt.
I’m not sure that helps at all, in terms of making such a number comprehensible. But anyway, I wonder what might happen in a community of nigh-immortal observers (is there really nothing better to do?), when one of those sheets of paper was placed on the ground. Would we celebrate? We would see so many sheets of paper placed and taken away, but would we celebrate each one? I hope so. Anyway…
New Year, New Me
Every so often — 365 days, give or take — we celebrate a new year. New Years is a two-faced holiday. There are New Years Parties and New Years Resolutions. Every year, there is an interminable debate in print about New Years Resolutions — good or bad? heroic or gauche? malevolent or fun? Meanwhile, New Years Parties go unexplored. Yet it is just as important for a successful New Years to understand what we are celebrating as it is to understand what we are planning. So what exactly are we celebrating, when the clocks strike midnight and our calendars strike January and Andy Cohen’s breathalyzer strikes 0.4 and the ball strikes Times Square, killing hundreds in a horrible engineering catastrophe?
A new year is a time to wonder at possibility — an old calendar is closed and a new one opened. What a mystery its blank pages expose! What novelties, what beauties, what unknowns are in store? It can all feel so exciting. Yet at the same time, mystery can be frustrating, beauty can feel useless, and novelty can become overwhelming. As much as we need novelties, beauties, and unknowns, so as well do we need certainties, utilities, and comfortable traditions. There is a time and place for it all, and now is a time and place for practicing a love of our less-than-clear fate. As Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said:
“The logical method and form flatter that longing for certainty and for repose which is in every human mind, … [but] certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.”
If we are not destined for repose, then we ought to find some comfort in the shifting sands on which we must stand. The ‘logical form’ is not always the best way to impress such lessons. To this end, I have gathered below an assortment of other people’s thoughts.
On Being In the Thick of It
“Stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread, and we want to know the whole cloth … What mind worthy of the name, beginning with Homer, ever reached a conclusion? Let’s accept the picture. That’s how things are. So be it”
— Gustave Flaubert
It seems like the first step in loving the picture is accepting it. There’s an interesting dance here where we do want to change the world, hopefully for the better, yet some level of accepting and loving the ‘picture’ as it is is necessary to not end up hating life. Flaubert, I don’t think, is cautioning against any sort of action at all, but rather the notion that we will find The Action that will end all the purposes and strains on living. And so long as you do not have that, you have no clear perfection of the world (no “conclusion”) in mind. And if there is nothing else the world could simply Be, then one must brook some sort of compromise with the fact of existing, in all its magnitude.
I’m just a little bit caught in the middle
Life is a maze and love is a riddle
I don’t know where to go, can’t do it alone
I’ve tried and I don’t know why
I'm just a little girl lost in the moment
I'm so scared but I don't show it
I can't figure it out, it's bringing me down
I know I've got to let it go and just enjoy the show
A funny song. Mixing melancholy and entertainment — a bit of wonder at all the questions with which life and love confront us all. Enjoying the questions themselves, perhaps with a pinch of whimsy, is exactly what we’re looking for.
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. … Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
It may be true that the longing for certainty is stronger and yet also further removed from its goal the younger one is. “Live the questions now.” Explore and do not prejudge, do not pretend to knowledge you could not now have or put to use.
“There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future.”
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre were deep believers in the centrality of freedom to human existence. Even if the present is confusing and scary, it is the very openness of the future which makes it worth something.
“All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”
— Jose Luis Borges
Perhaps our tribulations don’t always make us stronger, but they do inform us, make us who we are. ‘Shaping our art’ seems like a good way to think about it.
[H]e was publishing advice. Advice on how to survive the catastrophe of evil totalitarian dictatorship. And the beauty is the point.
Jünger never admitted even a shred of mental weakness, even privately. But objectively, everything he passionately believed in had been falling apart for years. When Jünger wrote this book, the German Catastrophe was in full swing and he was very aware it would all end in tears. He had retreated from his nationalist political work and almost all of his nationalist friends. He had refused bids of friendship from Hitler personally, from the National Socialist party (which repeatedly offered him a mandate in their token parliament) and from various Nazi organizations. A poem where he had bemoaned “the reign of the lowly” had gotten his home raided repeatedly. He and his brother expected a “typhoon” to ravage the country soon and they were hoping to weather it in their refuge in the small town by the Bodensee, where On the Marble Cliffs was written. He knew enough about the military strength of the various European powers, and was distant enough from the Nazi enthusiasm for war, to know that the putrid state of Germany that surrounded him was headed for catastrophic defeat and collapse. For many years, he had strived mightily to guide his beloved country to what he believed was a better path - and had evidently failed completely. How could he possibly have coped with all this?
I believe this book is his answer. And the answer is: look at beauty. [Emphasis in original]
— Book Review: On the Marble Cliffs
This is a long but deeply worthy book review delving into a fascinating character, a tragic novel, and a bit of sage wisdom from an unlikely quarter. Beauty cannot change the world, but it can help us love it, even when horror comes home to roost. I highly recommend the whole review (and, soon, hopefully, may be able to recommend the novel itself).
“The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.”
— G. K. Chesterton
G. K. Chesterton charges us who complain about the plainness of the world with a kind of complacency. This quote goes along with the egalitarian “the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,/But in ourselves, that we are underlings” from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Nothing in the world predestines us to cynicism, just as nothing in the world predestines us to servility.
“Look closely. The beautiful may be small.”
— Immanuel Kant
This makes a lovely pair to the previous quote. Again, just look a little harder, and let the wonders of the world speak for themselves.
“As thoughts invade the limitless multiformity of nature, its richness is impoverished, its springtimes die, and there is a fading in the play of its colors”
— G. W. F. Hegel
There is something comical about someone hoping to find nature more beautiful by learning about geological processes. Beauty, especially natural beauty, is at its best when it comes as mere appreciation, quieting our spirited practicalities which take up so much of our time.
“Let us be witnesses of wonder — perceiving all nature as a prayer come alive.”
— K'dushat HaYom
K’dushat HaYom is a prayer of sanctifying God’s name said on Shabbat. It ties the beauty of nature to the notion of a prayer — a hope, a piece of praise, a request. As complementing the Hegel quote, beauty comes when we see nature not in a classificatory lens, but as an instantiation of our hopes and invocations.
“Perhaps in this, I thought, lies the key to the good life — not rules to follow, nor problems to avoid, but an engaged humility, an earnest acceptance of life’s pains and promises.”
— Joshua Wolf Shenk, What Makes Us Happy?
In a review of one of the longest-running psychological studies ever recorded, Joshua Wolf Shenk details in several beautiful threads the pains and prides of both the subjects and director of the study. The study: follow a group of Harvard graduates for their whole life to see what makes someone ‘well-adjusted’, assuming that these nice young Harvard boys will be perfect for the cause. While its findings do not support the assumption, found among the prescriptions and theories are some lovingly catalogued people, just muddling through.
“One must cross the river by feeling the stones”
— Chinese proverb
One of the best expressions of the sense of being in the thick of it. We can’t see the whole way, but we can feel our next step.
This off-schedule post is, like my previous foray into fiction, not of the usual essay-style format. We will return to that format in mid-January with a post on economists’ theories about one of the most important questions in the social sciences: why Europe? In the meantime, Happy Near Year!