I know everyone gets songs stuck in their heads (we all do, don't we? Now I feel a weird urge to go look up cognitive studies to see if anyone knows what part of the brain causes earworms. And by extension if there are people who are relatively normal but can't remember music. The perils of writing stuff while on the internet are great indeed). But do you ever get phrases stuck in your head? I do. Bits of poetry ("whose woods are these I think I know - his house is in the village though"), which I guess is ok because it's close to music anyway, and proverbs and just general other stuff I've read (A Song of Ice and Fire is terrible for this. "What is dead may never die." How am I supposed to go cheerily about my day with that phrase bouncing around in my head?). Now that I think of it, this could be a great study tool if you could manage to get something you were supposed to memorise stuck in your brain.
Anyway. Last week I had "even the hairs on the head are numbered" following me around and popping into my brain every couple hours. This falls into the vague proverb-y category of phrases. Vaguely Bibical? And yes. According to a snappy little google moment, this phrase is in the Bible not once but twice (Luke 12:7 and Matthew 10:30, if you're wondering, fun fact). In the religious context the idea, I think, is that God is so omniscient and cares so much about you that He knows the number even of your tiny little hairs. Which is nice.
But the phrase "even the hairs on your head are numbered" got me thinking in kind of a different direction. Because the hairs on your head are numbered whether God knows it or not (and no, I'm not going to wade into debate on that point). There are a finite number of them. Just like there are a finite number of:
- Mosquitoes in the world
- Times you've eaten bacon for breakfast
- Times you've eaten breakfast at all
- Books you've read while eating stuff
- Books you've read at all
- Words you've read
- Times you've blinked
- And so on and on and on.
This is not the first time I've ever thought about this. I have a habit of setting up really trivial math problems to solve in my head on long car trips. I swear this is not as math nerdy as it sounds. I have a lot of weird road trip games to play in my head and the language-based ones are way nerdier. Anyway. Since I am far from a math savant, my problems tend to follow the line of "How many words did I submit in academic writing over the past year?" (Cop-out answer: too many) or "How many books have I read in my life?" And every time I think about how many things theoretically have a number, it amazes me.
There are all these enormous numbers that we'll never know and yet exist and make up the facts of your life. You've read all those words yourself. Those hairs are attached to your head. And you'll never know how many of them there are. For some reason that seems totally mind-blowing to me. It's just...cool. I can't decide if I'm comforted by the idea that there is a number for all these things (or do numbers and math in fact exist without human knowledge of them? I watched a Youtube video about this today...) or if I'm scared of the weird sense of looming mortality that this gives me. Because obviously, if there are a finite number of breaths I've taken so far, then inevitably there are a finite number of breaths I will take ever. Maybe this is why websites like this one exist, so obsessively counting and quantifying types can document their lives in the same way that more literary types use diaries - all in our human attempt to fend off that terrible sense of looming DEATH.
Well, that ended cheerily. Isn't math and thinking about existential dilemmas fun? Maybe I'll be a mathematical philosopher in my next life.
Smiling? Grimacing? Calculating?
Charlotte
