Nobody Better, Better Than Nobody

[Video: Sinéad O’Connor, “Nothing Compares 2 U.” ([Lyrics]) See the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

You’re always presented as a kind of loner in the mountains, the man from the farm…

What can you do. You get a name, you’re called “Thomas Bernhard,” and it stays that way for the rest of your life. And if at some point you go for a walk in the woods, and someone takes a photo of you, then for the next eighty years you’re always walking in the woods. There’s nothing you can do about it.

(Thomas Bernhard [source])

…and:

There will come an intermediate, joyous point where you find that certain techniques work even better than the scriptures claim. In the wake of these discoveries, you will also find that life continues to be just as thorny and problematic as ever. Does this mean that the study of Tao is useless? No. It only means that you have been laboring to equip yourself with skill. You must still go out and live your life to the end.

(Deng Ming-Dao [source])

Not from whiskey river:

What My House Would Be Like If It Were A Person

This person would be an animal.
This animal would be large, at least as large
as a workhorse. It would chew cud, like cows,
having several stomachs.
No one could follow it
into the dense brush to witness
its mating habits. Hidden by fur,
its sex would be hard to determine.
Definitely it would discourage
investigation. But it would be, if not teased,
a kind, amiable animal,
confiding as a chickadee. Its intelligence
would be of a high order,
neither human nor animal, elvish.
And it would purr, though of course,
it being a house, you would sit in its lap,
not it in yours.

(Denise Levertov [source])

Is it really true that no two snowflakes are alike?

Electrons are true elementary particles, in that they have no component parts; thus they are all exactly alike.

A water molecule is considerably more complex than an electron, and not all water molecules are exactly alike. If we restrict ourselves to water molecules which contain two ordinary hydrogen atoms and one ordinary ¹⁶O atom, then again physics tells us that all such water molecules are exactly alike. However about one molecule out of every 5000 naturally occurring water molecules will contain an atom of deuterium in place of one of the hydrogens, and about one in 500 will contain an atom of ¹⁸O instead of the more common ¹⁶O. These rogues are not exactly the same as their more common cousins.

Since a typical small snow crystal might contain 1018 water molecules, we see that about 1015 of these molecules will be different from the rest. These unusual molecules will be randomly scattered throughout the snow crystal, giving it a unique design. The probability that two snow crystals would have exactly the same layout of these molecules is very, very, very small. Even with 1024 crystals per year, the odds of it happening within the lifetime of the Universe is indistinguishable from zero…

Larger, complex snowflakes are all different. The number of possible ways of making a complex snowflake is staggeringly large. To see just how much so, consider a simpler question — how many ways can you arrange 15 books on your bookshelf? Well, there’s 15 choices for the first book, 14 for the second, 13 for the third, etc. Multiply it out and there are over a trillion ways to arrange just 15 books. With a hundred books, the number of possible arrangements goes up to just under 10¹⁵⁸ (that’s a 1 followed by 158 zeros). That number is about 1070 times larger than the total number of atoms in the entire universe!

Now when you look at a complex snow crystal, you can often pick out a hundred separate features if you look closely. Since all those features could have grown differently, or ended up in slightly different places, the math is similar to that with the books. Thus the number of ways to make a complex snow crystal is absolutely huge.

And thus it’s unlikely that any two complex snow crystals, out of all those made over the entire history of the planet, have ever looked completely alike.

(Kenneth G. Libbrecht [source])

…and:

An Exchange between the Fingers and the Toes

Fingers:
Cramped, you are hardly anything but fidgets.
We, active, differentiate the digits:
Whilst you are merely little toe and big
(Or, in the nursery, some futile pig)
Through vital use as pincers there has come
Distinction of the finger and the thumb;
Lacking a knuckle you have sadly missed
Our meaningful translation to a fist;
And only by the curling of that joint
Could the firm index come to have a point.
You cannot punch or demonstrate or hold
And therefore cannot write or pluck or mould:
Indeed, it seems deficiency in art
Alone would prove you the inferior part.

Toes:
Not so, my friends. Our clumsy innocence
And your deft sin is the main difference
Between the body’s near extremities.
Please do not think that we intend to please:
Shut in the dark, we once were free like you.
Though you enslaved us, are you not slaves, too?
Our early balance caused your later guilt,
Erect, of finding out how we were built.
Your murders and discoveries compile
A history of the crime of being agile,
And we it is who save you when you fight
Against the odds: you cannot take to flight.
Despite your fabrications and your cunning,
The deepest instinct is expressed in running.

(John Fuller [source])

Note: the title of this post is taken directly from a 1983 New Yorker profile, by Ian Frazier, of the woman — real name Poncé Cruse Evans — who (at least back then) wrote the “Hints from Heloise” newspaper column. The profile’s title, in turn, came from this line: “Poncé believes that everyone is created equal. One of the first things she ever said to me was ‘There’s nobody better than me, I’m no better than anybody else.'”

______________________

About the video: This cover of a song written by Prince came out in 1990. Almost nothing happens in it; everything happens in it. (It still makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck.) Actually the whole album on which it appeared, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, hit me the same way. A frequently quoted passage in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier claims that every man has one woman in his life who puts him “out of the business” — i.e., the pursuit of other women — for good; similarly, I’ve never owned another Sinéad O’Connor album: I can’t imagine I’d be more goose-bumpily thrilled with one.