Chapter 61 — An Ephemeral Wind
The Curve of Time, Chapter 61 —— An Ephemeral Wind, in which Zeno experiments with his new power.
Followed by musings on how examining logical extremes is helpful.
Listen to full episode :
— 61 —
An Ephemeral Wind
It did finally dawn on Zeno that, for Molly, his promenade about the room would have occurred at lightning speed. The thought, however, was subsumed by his preoccupation with whether, or not, he could reverse time altogether. The more he considered it, the more tantilizing the prospect was. Imagine the power. He began to slow time down again, all the while holding himself motionless on his mat, determined not to disturb his fellow meditators.
Time slowed for Zeno.
At first, his attention centered on his fellow attendees. Disciples in lotus position, each on their own mat, throughout the room. Their breathing, already slow, slowed more. Unnaturally so. The sound of their inhale and exhale leaving longer and longer gaps in between.
He expanded his attention to include the other sounds in the room. A fly butting up against the screen on the windows——thwack, thwack, thwack, thwack——and beyond that the water in the creek, not visible, but audibly slowing. An actual hummingbird flew past the window and Zeno was able to make out its wings. Far from a blur of color, he discerned individual feathers.
Zeno closed his eyes to concentrate. Slowing time was one thing, but imagine the power to reverse it. He sat very still on his mat.
∞
Molly’s concentration had been broken by Zeno’s earlier skittering about the room. She was surprised that she’d been the only one so disrupted, but perhaps he’d come closer to her than the others. Perhaps the others were better at meditating.
She had felt like a domino, brushed by a gust of wind. A flap of that metaphorical butterfly wing that upset her applecart.
Her nature, when interrupted, was to re-double her focus, and that was precisely what she’d done. To this day, she could trace that instinct to the time when she was ten and flying down West Galer Street in Queen Anne. A cobblestone had momentarily jarred her grip on her bike’s handlebars, and the shot of adrenaline that had focused her saved her when she hit a slick patch at the bottom of the incline. That memory still loomed large today.
Her ability to shut out the world around her was, however, no match for yet another animal instinct, that survival reflex that flagged potential imminent danger. And so it was, that when Zeno jerked suddenly, slapping the floor beside him with the back of his hand in a loud crack, she, like everyone else in the room, jolted to with a lightning bolt of raw energy.
It may have been that her state had been less somnambulant than the others, or maybe it was just that she was closest to Zeno. Whatever the case, Molly was first to reach out to the man cradling his hand and twitching his opposite shoulder. Had that been a secondary pain induced by his sudden jerking motion? Had Zeno fallen more violently into sleep than the worst twitch at the cusp of unconsciousness?
As a girl she’d been fascinated by her dog as he fell asleep after mucking in the fields.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
∞
Failing to hide his pain, Zeno nonetheless struggled to assure Molly that he was fine.
She had seen only the tip of the iceberg, she had no clue of the deeper stumbling block Zeno had been wrestling with: slowing time down was possible, but reversing it . . . reversing it represented untold danger.
To Zeno, this felt like another game of cat and mouse. It was an echo of his own investigation into Saskia, and, he ought probably do now, what he’d done then: take his investigations into private quarters. To anyone who might have known about it, his probing of Saskia’s involvement in the DBG rig fiasco would naturally have appeared to have been focused on who she was and how she might have been connected to the human leak. That was, after all, what the world around him was in a tizzy about. Zeno’s interest, however, had been far more significant: the timing of her visit, coinciding as well as it had with the onset of his own newfound power. He felt a swell of pride that nobody suspected his new gift. It was the art of magic to direct an audience’s attention to one dimension while simultaneously moving objects about in another.
Well, Friends, that was chapter 61. I hope you enjoyed it!
I, for one, admired Zeno’s boldness in this chapter, to experiment in front of an audience, as it were. It was a great example of the importance of putting your theories about the world to the test, come what may.
I also love that Zeno’s instinct was to slow time as much as he could; to test if, by doing so, he could even turn it around. His actions were in the spirit of the mathematical strategy of taking an idea to its logical extreme in order to gain insight.
“How might that work?” I hear you think.
Easiest (and most fun) to illustrate with the Monty Hall problem, the classic example: so, imagine you’re on a gameshow and there are three doors. Behind one, is a car. Behind the other two are goats. For the purposes of this problem, you are not a farmer with a desperate need for goats, but an ordinary person who sees the car as a significantly more valuable object.
The host of the show asks you to pick a door. You pick one. Then, the host opens another door and shows you a goat! (Yes, the host knows which door the car is behind). The host then turns to you and asks: would you like to keep your door, or switch?
If you haven’t heard this problem before, I’d encourage you to pause a moment. Have a think. Switch, or stay with your original choice?
Now, you might be a genius and see through this problem immediately, but most people start with an analysis that sounds something like this: Looks pretty much like I have a fifty-fifty chance now of picking the right door, but since the host knew which door they could open they might well be trying to mislead me. Probably, I should stay with what I picked in the first place. I mean, maybe switch, in case the host was double bluffing? Nah, stay with my initial choice.
And, all in all, it doesn’t really seem as though the host has helped you at all, and I couldn’t fault you for such reasoning; it’s been a long time since I first heard this problem, but I kind of suspect that that was not so far from my own first blush intuition. As you might guess though, there is a simpler way of seeing what you should do.
Here’s the idea: change the problem to make it more extreme. In this case, imagine that there are 1000 doors, with 999 goats and one car. You pick a door. Then the host opens the doors to 998 goats. You’re left with a choice of staying with the door you initially picked, or switching to the only other door left closed. In this case, it seems to most people much more prudent to switch. Basically you had no chance of picking correctly initially, but the host has effectively reduced the rest of the possibilities to one choice. Think of it this way: your initial choice was 1 in 1000. But once you picked it, the host is now carefully consolidating the rest of the doors to one possibility.
Scaling back to the original problem, the odds don’t change as dramatically, but you’re still better off switching.
Alright, that was a mathematical analysis, but here’s a real world context in which this sort of thinking can help: there is a cost to spending as much time as you can with a loved one, even if they’re critically ill. To see this, imagine the logical extreme: suppose they hang on for four years and you stay by their bedside the entire time. In that time, your new born child learns to laugh, crawl, walk and talk. Missing those moments is a price.
Maybe this is all just the mathematical way of saying: The world would do a little better to think about moderation. For the mathematician it takes the extreme case to see the truth in that sentiment.
Even for Saskia, time is limited. Sure she can slip through time, but she’s still aging. And even if she wasn’t physically aging, her psyche ages as she gets more world experience, and this changes how and what she appreciates.
Life really is lived in the greys.
Until next week, be kind to someone and keep an eye out for the ripples of joy you’ve seeded.
Cheerio
Rufus
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