The Stochastic Man

I think we made love three times that final summer. Made love! Preposterous euphemism for fucking, almost as bad as the most grotesque of all, slept together. Whatever Sundara and I made, in those three pressings of flesh to flesh, love couldn’t have been the commodity; we made sweat, we made rumpled sheets, we made heavy breathing, we even made orgasms, but love? Love?

So it is with all the great leaders: the commodity they have to sell is personality. Mere ideas can be left to lesser men.

Thus does the unyielding, inescapable future ineluctably devour the present.

Gottfried, like any true dictator, liked to surround himself with bland obliging ciphers.

In the absolute universe all events can be regarded as absolutely deterministic, and if we can’t perceive the greater structures, it’s because our vision is faulty. If we had a real grasp of causality down to the molecular level, we wouldn’t need to rely on mathematical approximations, on statistics and probabilities, in making predictions. If our perceptions of cause and effect were only good enough, we’d be able to attain absolute knowledge of what is to come. We would make ourselves all-seeing.

We are born by accident into a purely random universe.

No man ever looked more like a President than Harding; it was his only qualification for the job, but it was enough to get him there.