Randomness

This may not be the best time to open a blog. On the contrary, the time is in fact quite inopportune, given the following incident that occurred to me early today.

In Georges Remi’s comic series The Adventures of Tintin, there is an episode called “The Seven Crystal Balls,” in which members of an excursion group who recently explored an ancient Peruvian tomb were mysteriously killed by crystal balls. I myself got such a ball.

Yesterday was the day of the annual Antrim Street Yale Sale. Despite the lousy weather, my neighbors still enthusiastically put up quite a display of their old stuff. As I was meandering around, I found a mini-globe with a magnet in it, hanging down from a tablelamp kind of frame. The globe could even spin when I pushed it a bit.

“50 cents.” A middle-age woman said with a smile.

“I’ll take it.” I always wanted a globe.

Early this morning, as I was sitting in front of my computer and staring at my globe behind, an idea, a rather random idea came to my mind.

“It is quite dirty. I should clean it.” I thought.

I did. But right after that I accidentally dropped it on the floor, and it sounded that something fell off inside the globe.

“Does my little-thinny still work?”

With that thought, I placed the globe on the keyboard of my labtop, for one second. Perhaps even shorter than that.

Clearly the globe worked fine, as it was tightly sucked to the computer. Yet, for that one second, the globe killed my computer.

A lethal magnetic ball!

But friends, think about how random the whole thing happened. Had I not randomly placed the globe behind my computer, I would not have stared at it this morning. Had I not taken up this random thought of cleaning it, I would not have dropped it afterwards. Then had I not dropped it, again quite a random event, I would not have tested it on my computer. Surely my lack of knowledge on the destructive power of magnet on computers contributed to the disaster, but think about how many random events had to accumulate before that!

How much of our lives are constituted by such random events? How much of these random, seemingly trivial events shape the trajectories of our lives?

This is not a passivist or a fatalist perspective, because in those cases events are pre-determined, the opposite of randomness. Here we are enmeshed in the labyrinth of probability.

In the movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button adapted from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s namesake story, we see a series of scenes showing how Benjamin’s lover Daisy (played by Cate Blanchett) was struck by a car. It was a series of mundane and random events that led to Daisy’s accident. It did not have to happen to her; it just happened to her. It was not what was meant to be; it was an outcome of an accumulation of many random events. If we do the math, we will conclude that the probability of what happened to Daisy is less than a thousandth of one percent. It is infinitesimal, yet it is a solid infinitesimal.

In Milan Kundera’s magnificent book The Unbearable Lightness of Being, we find a similar story, this time the outcome was good, about how Franz and Tereza met. Again, their initial encounter, which triggered the following love story, derived sheerly from randomness, or fortuities in Kundera’s word. Here is Kundera:

“After Tomas had returned to Prague from Zurich, he began to feel uneasy at the thought that his acquaintance with Tereza was the result of six improbable fortuities.

But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?

Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessary, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read its message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup.”

“Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress… it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.”

Kundera’s acumen and wisdom are at his full strength.

In the movie Run Lola Run, we see another way of portraying fortuities. Lola ran three times in the movie for her boyfriend, with slightly different speeds. The difference was slight to the extant that Lola passed the same spot only a few seconds later than her previous run. But that tiny difference got quickly amplified into the difference of life or death at the end of Lola’s run.

In our lives, we only run once.

Here is Kundera again:

“Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which bad is that in a given situation we can make only one decision; we are not granted a second, third, or fourth life in which to compare various decisions.”

“Einmal ist keinmal. What happens but once might as well not have happened at all… History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.”

Perhaps that is the way I should think about the incident early today. It occurred only once, therefore it is unbearably light. Because of its randomness, there is a dimension of beauty in it.

More on Kundera’s book in the future.